michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
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Post by michelle on Apr 15, 2006 15:21:13 GMT 4
Empire, Inequality, and the Arrogance Of Power by Paul Street www.dissidentvoice.orgApril 14, 2006 One of the great privileges of power is the right to attack others for doing -- or allegedly doing (see below) -- exactly what you do without anybody who matters calling you on your hypocrisy. Think of the affluent white Americans who criticize the alleged personal irresponsibility, cultural inadequacy, and welfare dependency of the inner city poor. Never mind that these wealthy Americans engage in an ongoing orgy of conspicuous and ecologically toxic consumption. Forget that they typically invest in and/or receive generous salaries from corporations that receive massive public subsidies while cheating customers, subverting regulations, deepening inequality, slashing wages and benefits, abandoning communities, discriminating against women and minorities, and/or otherwise contributing to human misery at home and abroad. Such blatant hypocrisy generally proceeds without public notice or exposure. The White House, to give another example, declares that any state harboring terrorists is a terrorist state and is therefore subject to just invasion and attack by “the civilized world,” led of course, by Washington. It is left to the lunatic fringe to point out that the leader of civilization would be justly bombed by this standard since the U.S. happens to host such known terrorists as Orlando Bosch, who collaborated in blowing up a civilian Cuban airliner as part of a U.S. directed campaign against the Castro government (see Noam Chomsky, Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy [New York, NY: Metropolitan Books, 2006], p. 6) It is left to the leftist denizens of the radical nuthouse to point out that U.S. foreign policy has long used (state-) terrorist methods to slaughter masses of innocent people in places like Vietnam (where American forces killed more than two million people between 1962 and 1975) and Iraq, where more than a million died from US-imposed economic sanctions during the 1990s. The current US-led invasion of Iraq has killed more than 100,000 civilians. Do the savage U.S. torture camps and brutal state-terrorist “interrogation” techniques maintained and conducted in Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, and Bagram Air Force base, among other locations help the U.S. qualify as a fitting candidate for punitive attack by “the civilized world?” How about the role that John Negroponte, current U.S. Director of National Intelligence, played as U.S. ambassador to Honduras in the 1980s? Negroponte ran interference for the Honduran security forces in the U.S. Congress, making sure that U.S. military assistance kept flowing to Honduras while those forces conducted a brutal campaign of torture and massacre against that nation's civilian populace. Negroponte’s main job in Honduras, however, was to oversee the terrorist contra camps in Honduras, from which a C.I.A.-equipped mercenary force launched repeated murderous attacks that killed masses of Nicaraguan civilians (see Chomsky, Failed States, p. 151) These are relevant questions only for the aforementioned nutcases. VENEZUELA'S "VERY EXTRAVAGANT FOREIGN POLICY" Speaking of Negroponte, he takes the powerful pot-calling-the-not-so-powerful kettle-black game to a new level. A recent front-page New York Times article on Venezuela’s foreign policy contains some very interesting reflections from the United States' blood-soaked über-snoop. By Negroponte’s observation, respectfully reported without properly stunned amazement or derision by the Times, Venezuela’s president Hugo Chavez is "spending considerable sums involving himself in the political and economic life of other countries in Latin America and elsewhere, this despite the very real economic development and social needs of his own country. It’s clear,” Negroponte told a Congressional hearing last month, “he is spending hundreds of millions, if note more, for his very extravagant foreign policy.” Negroponte’s tone of concern over Chavez's "extravagance" was loyally repeated in the Times’ article, which bore the ominous title “CHAVEZ SEEKING FOREIGN ALLIES, SPENDING BILLIONS: Oil! Used in Rivalry With U.S. for Influence in the Americas” (April 4, 1968). Forget for a moment, as the Times dutifully did, that the Chavez government has been “using its oil revenues for the public good” by “doing what previous elite-dominated [Venezuelan] governments failed to do: providing for the basic political, social, and economic needs of the population. Oil revenue,” Maria Paez Victor recently noted, “is now used for universal health services, education at all levels, clean water, food security, micro credits, support for small and middle range industry, land distribution and deeds for de-facto owners, worker cooperatives, infrastructure, such as roads and railways and support for independent community radio,” leading to significant ongoing improvements in the social health of Venezuela (Maria Paez Victor, “Mr. Danger and the Socialism for the New Millennium,” Speech to the University of Toronto Walter Gordon/Massey Symposium, March 15, 2006). And forget also that Chavez’s supposedly “extravagant” and power mad (Donald Rumsfeld recently likened Chavez to Adolph Hitler) foreign policy appears to alleviate and counter economic and social problems and abroad and thus stands in sharp contrast to the regressive dictates and outcomes of U.S. foreign policy. Chavez, by the Times’ own account, has “been subsidizing… eye surgery for poor Mexicans and even heating fuel for poor families from Maine to the Bronx to Philadelphia.” He has helped Argentina overcome its foreign debt and given $3.8 million in foreign aid to four African nations. In the Bronx last winter, the Times reports, Venezuela’s oil corporation Citgo “provided heating fuel at a 40 percent discount to some 8,000 low-income residents of 75 apartment buildings.” IMPERIAL HOMELAND PRIORITIES Put all that aside and reflect upon the curious fact, naturally not mentioned by the Times, that the U.S. is a great perpetrator when it comes to the crime of sacrificing domestic social and economic health and development to the pursuit of an "extravagant foreign policy" involving massive interference in the internal affairs of other nations. The U.S. spends more than $500 billion each year on an imperial defense budget that maintains more than 720 military bases located in nearly every country on the planet, including many in Central and Southern America. But this is only one way in which Uncle Sam “involv[es] himself in the political and economic life of other countries in Latin America and elsewhere.” Other forms of such involvement include the powerful and regressive neoliberal economic interventions of the U.S.-dominated International Monetary Fund and World Bank, the vast reach of American corporate media and consumer culture, the ubiquitous political pressure of U.S. “diplomacy,” the placement of explicitly propagandistic “news” stories in foreign newspaper and television, and the flooding of Central American markets with highly subsidized U.S. agricultural exports. The U.S. government has even been known to invade and occupy other, formerly sovereign states, smashing their existing nation-state and insisting that the occupied nations develop in accord with U.S. imposed politico-economic dictates. How "extravagant" (and expensive) is all that?
All of this global extravagance transpires while: * More than 37 million residents of the United States (which US Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson [R-Texas] calls "the beacon to the world of the way life should be") languish beneath the federal government's notoriously low poverty level ($15,219 for a family of three in 2004). * More than 13 million or 18 percent of US children live below that sorry measure, and the US child poverty rate is substantially higher than that of other industrialized nations. * 15.6 million Americans live at LESS THAN HALF the inadequate U.S. poverty level, comprising 42 percent of the nation's giant poverty population. * More than one in three US children live in or near poverty and more than 8 million Americans live in homes that frequently skip meals or eat too little. * More than 45 million Americans lack health coverage, making up 16 percent of the U.S. population. The U.S. is still the only modern industrialized state without a universal, socially inclusive health insurance plan. * The top 1 percent owns more than 40 percent of the wealth in the U.S. * The top 10 percent owns two-thirds of US wealth, leaving the rest of us -- 90 percent of the population -- to fight it out for one third of the nation's assets. * The net worth (all assets minus all liabilities) of the typical black family in the U.S. is around $8000, roughly 7 percent of the typical white family's net worth -- that’s seven black cents on the white dollar. * As the Times acknowledged in a front-page story last May, “Life at the Top Isn't Just Better, It's Longer” because "class is a potent force in health and longevity in the United States. The more education and income people have, the less likely they are to have and die of heart disease, strokes, diabetes and many types of cancer. Upper-middle-class Americans live longer and in better health than middle-class Americans, who live longer and better than those at the bottom. And the gaps are widening, say people who have researched social factors in health. As advances in medicine and disease prevention have increased life expectancy in the United States," Times reporter J. Scott elaborated, "the benefits have disproportionately gone to people with education, money, good jobs and connections. They are almost invariably in the best position to learn new information early, modify their behavior, take advantage of the latest treatments and have the cost covered by insurance." * Unequal health care contributes to more than 100,000 black Americans dying earlier than whites each year. Middle-aged black men die at nearly twice the rate as white men of a similar age. I could go on and on. The list of the “very real” but all-too unmet “economic development and social needs” and savage racial and related class disparities in the imperial “homeland” is practically endless. It is also getting bigger with time. As the Times reported (along with the rest of "mainstream" media) earlier this year, the Bush II administration has seen the U.S. poverty rate rise during every single year of its existence. That terrible measure has never gone up each year for five straight years until now. This remarkable record of worsening misery at the bottom of the United States’ steep socioeconomic pyramid partly reflects the deliberate bankrupting of social programs through a militantly plutocratic program of massive tax cutting that primarily benefits the already super-wealthy. It also reflects the huge social and democratic opportunity cost of the imperial state’s addiction to an extravagantly expensive militarism. The U.S. spends nearly as much on what it deceptively calls “defense” as the rest of the world. In 2002, the U.S. military budget was 30 times bigger than the combined spending of the seven official U.S. "rogue" states -- Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan and Syria (when will Venezuela be added to the list?) -- who together spent $14.4 billion. The seven "rogue" enemies plus Russia and (long-term Pentagon obsession) China together spent $116.2 billion, equal to just 27.6% of the U.S. military budget. TAX DAY Meanwhile, here’s how the National Priorities Project (NPP) breaks down the tax bill American paid for 2005, by the end of which the invasion of Iraq had cost more than $270 billion. Let's say you paid Uncle Sam $1,000 last April. Your patriotic investment in the American public sector was used as follows: * $285 went to the military, what the federal government likes to call “defense" and what would more accurately be called "empire." * $200 went to "health care": all health spending by the federal government, including federal spending on Medicare and Medicaid. * $180 went to pay interest on the debt (which costs the nation $317.3 billion each year) that is to pay off domestic and international bond holders/global finance capital. * $60 went to "income security," including Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, Supplementary Security Income, and various programs for families and kids. * $40 went to education: all federal expenditures on elementary, secondary, higher education and federal research and general education assistance. * $37 went to benefits for veterans (which some analysts would include under “military”). * $27 went to nutrition spending, including Food Stamps and all child nutrition programs. * $20 went to housing: all federal housing assistance. * $14 went to environmental protection. * $ 3 went to job training. "Defense" (empire) outweighed education by more than 7to 1; income security (for the poor) by more than 4 to 1; nutrition by more than 10 to 1; housing by 14 to 1; environmental protection by 20 to 1; and job training by 95 to 1. The military accounts for more than half of all discretionary -- not previously obligated -- federal spending. And don't be fooled by the number two ranking for health care. Most of that $200 is a transfer payment to the corporate-medical-industrial complex, just as much of the “defense” budget is a transfer payment to such giant corporate masters of war as Raytheon, Lockheed-Martin, and Boeing. US governmental per-capita health expenditures are higher than those of some nations with national health insurance plans (including France and Germany) because of America's inordinately high doctor salaries, skyrocketing drug prices in the US (where consumers flex little countervailing bargaining power against the market-setting capacity of leading pharmaceutical corporations), and the flood of paper work and bureaucratic bloat in the private (corporate) "health" sector. The NPP also breaks down the social costs of the Iraq occupation. As of April 6, 2006 at 5:30 PM, the NPP reported, Washington’s imperial war of choice on Mesopotamia had cost more than $271 billion. With that same sum of money, the NPP calculated, the United States could have: enrolled 30,923,096 U.S. children in Head Start for one year; provided health insurance for one year to 162,406,756 children; built 2,442,073 additional housing units; hired 4,700,260 additional public school teachers for one year; and given 13,148,101 Americans a four-year college scholarship at a public university. KING'S FORGOTTEN LEGACY: "THE TRIPLE EVILS THAT ARE INTERRELATED" The day on which the New York Times story about Chavez’s “extravagant foreign policy” (Negroponte) appeared -- April fourth -- happened to mark the 38th anniversary of the assassination (or perhaps state execution) of the great civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. King, it is haunting to recall, was killed exactly one year after he delivered his famous “Time to Break the Silence” speech denouncing the Vietnam War at the Riverside Church in New York City. By the time of that famous oration, King was regularly speaking and writing against what he called "the triple evils that are interrelated": militarism, poverty, and racism. "I [can] never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettoes," King said, "without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government." He was moved to speak out on Vietnam, he said, by "allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism." His Christian-humanist values meant that he could not watch passively as "as we poison" the Vietnamese peoples' "water, as we kill a million acres of their crops," and "send them into the hospitals, with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one 'Vietcong'-inflicted injury." The people of Indochina, King mused, must find Americans to be "strange liberators" as "we destroy... their... famil[ies], village ,... land and... crops."
But focusing back on the imperial homeland, King also noted that many young black Americans and poor whites were in Vietnam because their poverty was so high and their job prospects so low that enlistment looked like a step up. He observed that the American government's resort to mass bloodshed in Southeast Asia was undermining his ability to argue effectively for nonviolent resistance to inequality and racism in American ghettoes. And he passionately decried the fact that the U.S. government's decision to pour tens of millions of dollars into the "crucifixion of Southeast Asia" (as Noam Chomsky once aptly described an American military assault that killed 3 million residents of that region) was undercutting its ability to deliver on the "promissory note" of social justice it had started to write with its briefly declared "War on Poverty." "With the resources accruing from the termination of the war, arms race, and excessive space races," King told the US Senate in 1966, "the elimination of all poverty could become an immediate national reality. At present," he bitterly observed, "the war on poverty is not even a battle, it is scarcely a skirmish." "Defense" expenditures in Vietnam, King knew, were strangling the anti-poverty "war" in its cradle.
Struggling against the toxic, interrelated logics of empire, inequality, and racism, King called for "a radical reordering of the nation's priorities." By 1967, he went public with his determination that that "reordering" required "restructuring the whole of American society." "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift," King warned, "is approaching spiritual death." Nearly four decades after King's death, the U.S. government dishonors the now officially iconicized civil rights leader's officially forgotten anti-imperialist and social-justice legacy by prioritizing militarism over social provision and health like no time in memory. It is once again sacrificing domestic social and economic needs to the extravagant costs of waging an imperial war for “so-called freedom” (King on the Vietnam War) abroad.
Adding Orwellian insult to injury, the leading imperial terror manager Negroponte has the unmitigated gall to falsely accuse a relatively small and populist Latin American state of sacrificing its domestic social health to an expensive, expansionist, and “extravagant foreign policy.” And the United States' leading “liberal” newspaper, which guards the leftmost boundary of the narrow moral-ideological spectrum in a spiritually dead “mainstream” media, naturally refuses to call the imperial functionary on his astonishing and odious hypocrisy.
Paul Louis Street is a writer, activist, teacher, and public speaker based in DeKalb, IL, and Iowa City, IA. His many publications include Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, October 2004). He can be reached at: pstreet@niu.edu.
Other Recent Articles by Paul Street [links at the site]:
* The “Realistic” Pessimism of the Do-Nothing Liberal-Left Intelligentsia * “The Face of Sacrifice”: Another Example of the NY Times’ Service to Imperial Power * Pentagon Puppets and Other Orwellian Horrors at USA Today * Messianic Militarism Versus Democracy in Imperial America * “Dishonest and Reprehensible”? * The "Cowardice" Card: Militarism's Last and Self-Fulfilling Refuge * Bill Clinton Was No Champion of the Poor * Dominant Media and Damage Control in the Wake of a Not-So Natural Disaster * The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans: Empire, Inequality, Race and Oil * Still Separate, Unequal: Race, Place, Policy & Racism Avoidance in and Around Chicago * Bush, China, Two Deficits, and the Ongoing Decline of US Hegemony * Watergate Was a Minor Crime * The Nuclear Option” and the One Party State * Terri Schiavo, 84,000 Black Men, and Dominant Media's Selective Morality * “Because We Are America!” * Martin Luther King. Jr. and “The Triple Evils That Are Interrelated” * Love Motivates Us to Kill the Enemy * Rumseld to Troops in Iraq: “Fight Naked...Life’s a Bitch and Then YOU Die” * No Apology for Dissent: Truth and Cowardice * Love, Hates, Kills, Dies * Killing on Tape and the Broader War Criminality * Dear Europe * The United States: “As Menacing to Itself and the World As Ever” * The Fabric of Deception and Liberal Complicity * Campaign Reflections: Resentment Abhors a Vaccum * The 9/11 Commission Report: Bush's Negligence Didn't Happen * Notes on Race, Gender, and Mass Infantilization * “A Descending Spiral Ending in Destruction for All-Too Many” * Racist Democratic Empire and Atrocity Denial * Kerry's Predictable Failure to Make Bush Pay for Rising US Poverty * Thought Control, Costas, the Olympics and Imperial Occupations Past and Present * JF Kerry: “I am Not a [Redistribution] Democrat” * Stupid White Men and Why Segregation Matters * The "Vile Maxim" Versus the Common Good: Different Approaches to November * We Need a New Media Relationship * “Failed States” at Home and Abroad * Be “Part of Something”: Sign Up With The American Empire Project * Congratulations, Mr. Bush: You Have Not Presided Over the Final Collapse of Capitalism * "Slaves Had Jobs Too" * Brown v. Board Fifty Years Out: Still Separate and Unequal * Let Them Eat "Cakewalk" * England, America, Empire, and Inequality * Niall Ferguson Speaks on the Need for Imperial Ruthlessness * Richard A. Clarke, Rwanda, and “Narcissistic Compassion” * Honest Mistakes? The New York Times on "The Failure to Find Iraqi Weapons" * Urban Race Relations: "Everything Changed" After 9/11? * Forbidden Connections: Class, Cowardice, and War * The "Repair" of "Broken Societies" Begins at Home * Deep Poverty, Deep Deception: Facts That Matter Beneath The Imperial Helicopters
SOURCE: www.dissidentvoice.org/Apr06/Street14.htm
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michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
Posts: 2,100
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Post by michelle on Apr 17, 2006 13:11:02 GMT 4
Aside from the FACT that taxes on our labor is illegal [see reply and movie trailer above] let's look at what the corporations are getting back on their refunds. Corporations have managed to dominate the planet plus they get a free ride. And if you are like most Americans, insecure in your knowing that you may not have a job tomorrow, let's look at the magic of the American Jobs Creation Act, a piece of legislation that passed with comfortable margins in both the House and the Senate and was signed into law by President Bush just two weeks before the 2004 elections.....Michelle: The $104 Billion Refund The most absurd corporate tax giveaway of 2005.By Michelle Leder Posted Thursday, April 13, 2006, at 12:33 PM ET Feeling flush because you're getting a nice tax refund this year? You're not alone. Some of America's largest corporations—a virtual who's who of the Fortune 100—have been reporting their own hefty tax windfalls, thanks to an absurd provision of a law designed to create jobs. IBM, for example, is banking a $2.8 billion refund—well, better to call it a "tax savings"—because instead of paying the normal corporate tax rate of 35 percent on $9.5 billion in profits it earned overseas, the company paid only 5.25 percent. That's the magic of the American Jobs Creation Act, a piece of legislation that passed with comfortable margins in both the House and the Senate and was signed into law by President Bush just two weeks before the 2004 elections. The AJCA, which was pushed through during the last fit of panic about outsourcing, was ostensibly designed to encourage companies to add jobs here. It gave a small tax deduction to American manufacturers, and it offered a one-time tax holiday in 2005 when corporations could repatriate their foreign income at a massively reduced tax rate. This repatriation, the theory went, would encourage R & D and capital investment in the United States, leading to new positions down the road. But, like President Bush's creatively named Clear Skies initiative and Healthy Forest Restoration Act, the American Jobs Creation Act has not lived up to its title. Take IBM. According to its annual report for 2005, the company added fewer than 400 jobs worldwide last year to its workforce of 329,000 people. At the same time, IBM shed 5 million square feet of space in the United States, making it highly unlikely that any of those jobs were added in the U.S. Indeed, numerous news reports, including this Business Week article, put IBM's head count in India at close to 40,000 at the end of 2005, more than a fourfold increase over the 9,000 reported at the end of 2003. Analysts anticipate that American companies will have repatriated around $350 billion in 2005 as a result of the law. While it's hard to make a straight calculation because of the vagaries of the tax code, that works out to a savings of roughly $104 billion on corporate America's tax bill. At Pfizer, the pharmaceutical giant that announced the single largest repatriation—$37 billion—the one-time windfall works out to approximately $11 billion. That kind of tax savings buys a lot of $600-an-hour lobbyists, though not, apparently, many scientists and salespeople. In its annual report, Pfizer doesn't list employees by region. But the company's total head count dropped to 106,000 at the end of 2005, about 8 percent fewer jobs than at the end of 2004. "It basically gave money to corporations in return for corporate contributions," says Bob McIntyre, director of Citizens for Tax Justice. As for the law's name, McIntyre says that Congress was "just kidding." One of the few groups that believes the legislation has led to the creation of jobs is the American Shareholders Association, a spinoff of Americans for Tax Reform, led by conservative activist Grover Norquist. In a report last month, the American Shareholders Association said that stock buybacks, dividends and mergers, and acquisitions were up sharply because of the legislation and that this in turn had led to the creation of 500,000 high-paying jobs in the United States. Not so far. Some companies taking advantage of the generous tax break haven't even tried to hide their layoffs. In January 2005, on the same day it announced it was cutting 6 percent of its workforce, National Semiconductor said that it was repatriating $500 million under the American Jobs Creation Act. Colgate-Palmolive, which in December 2004 announced plans to cut more than 4,000 jobs, brought back $800 million in overseas profits last year. The Wall Street Journal reported in December that the combination of repatriation and job cuts prompted Amalgamated Bank, which owns Colgate shares, to file a shareholder resolution arguing that the company's brand and reputation would be damaged by such moves. Julie Gozan, director of corporate governance for Amalgamated, said the resolution was withdrawn before Colgate filed its proxy on March 31 because the company agreed to provide more information to investors on the impact of the AJCA later this year. But Gozan said that Amalgamated is considering similar resolutions at several other companies where it owns stock. In addition to lowering the tax rate, the AJCA required companies to rewrite all sorts of employment contracts. Mike Melbinger, head of executive compensation and employee benefits at Winston and Strawn, a large Chicago-based law firm, estimated that the typical large company might have 30 employment contracts, 10 change-in-control agreements, and various severance plans, all of which had to be changed as a result of the 2004 law. "It was a ton of work," says Melbinger. "As much as we like to get paid, it was terrible for the clients." So at least the American Jobs Creation Act benefited one group of American workers: corporate lawyers. Related in Slate -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- For more on taxes, see Slate's Tax Week 2006 coverage: Henry Blodget on how your mutual fund is raising your IRS bill, Melonyce McAfee on where the government actually banks your taxes when you pay them, and Daniel Engber on whether tax-cheats go to jail. Michelle Leder writes a daily blog at www.footnoted.org that looks at SEC filings and is the author of Financial Fine Print: Uncovering a Company's True Value. SOURCE:www.slate.com/id/2139782
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michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
Posts: 2,100
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Post by michelle on Apr 20, 2006 20:30:18 GMT 4
I'm always amazed by some of the people in the United States who are better off than most; the ones who are pullin' in a hundred to five hundred thousand a year. They seem to equate themselves with the wealthy in our country, and they nearly always support political candidates who work for the concerns of the super rich in our country.
If I were privy to the thoughts that run through their heads, I wonder what they must be thinking. Do they ever feel guilt for voting in the most vile administration this country has ever seen? Do they look around their homes and all their stuff and feel justified in supporting wholesale slaughter of people around the world, the exploitation of peoples to keep their stock profiles growing? Or are they sickened with a dull remorse, knowing that their small scale covetousness has empowered some of the greediest people on the planet, who would look towards these slightly well-to-do Americans with no more interest, or comradeship than than they do towards an insect.
Wouldn't it be more realistic for the upper middle class in the the United States to equate themselves with we at the bottom? Who the heck would ever want to be associated with the rich and infamous in our country?
We are nothing to the actual wealthy in this country, we are bugs to be squashed at a moments notice. The following article gives you some insight to the concerns of the rich; it certainly isn't their fellow man...... MichelleThe very rich in America: “The kind of money you cannot comprehend”By David Walsh 19 April 2006 “Let me tell you about the very rich,” F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote in a 1926 story, “They are different from you and me.” But even Fitzgerald could not have imagined how different “from you and me” the very rich would become in America eight decades later. The sums that the very wealthy have at their disposal in the US are almost unimaginable: Oil executive Lee Raymond receiving some $400 million in a retirement package; the 2005 compensation of bank chairman Richard Fairbank totaling some $280 million; Omid Korestani, head of Google’s global sales, exercising stock options providing him with $288 million last year. The accumulation is brazen. What once would have been considered a somewhat discreditable fact of social life, the proliferation of billionaires, is now hailed as a sign of America’s success. The demise of the Soviet Union and the supposed absence of any alternative to capitalism, the putrefaction of the AFL-CIO trade unions, the ignominious collapse of American liberalism and the lack to this point of broad-based, organized political opposition to the ruling elite and its two parties have rendered the American financial aristocracy “dizzy with success.” These people have lost their heads. In the face of public outrage over oil company profits and soaring gasoline prices, Exxon arrogantly defended Raymond’s hundreds of millions, arguing that they were rewarding the executive’s “outstanding leadership of the business, continued strengthening of our worldwide competitive position, and continuing progress toward achieving long-range strategic goals.” The company added that it considered Raymond’s compensation package “appropriately positioned.” In a study published in October 2005, three accounting professors reported that negative, even occasionally scathing press coverage, “does not substantively change corporate behaviour with regard to pay packages.” The American establishment is all but impervious to the sentiments of the broad masses of the population. In response to a recent report detailing the immense and growing social gap, a spokesman for New York state’s Business Council told a reporter that the incomes earned by his state’s rich were “something that everybody who cares about New York should be pleased about.” An insulated world of immense wealth exists as never before, at least in modern US history. The number of Americans with assets of $1 million or more reached 7.5 million in 2004, according to a survey conducted by the Spectrem Group. Beyond that, however, are those who possess “Ultra High Net Worth” (a mellifluous term invented by Merrill Lynch circa 2001): individuals in households with $5 million or more in net worth. In a country of 300 million people, the UHNW form a very small percentage of the population, but a not insignificant number in absolute terms. Economic, political and cultural life in America is to an enormous extent organized for their benefit. This is not simply obscene or unjust, it is socially irrational and immensely destructive. How is it possible to allocate resources, repair and renew the infrastructure, carry out any type of long-term economic planning, cure any social ills, when the official guiding principle is the ability of an oligarchic elite to accumulate ever-greater personal wealth? The gravitational pull of such wealth asserts itself in every aspect of life.The New York Times reported last year on a relatively new phenomenon, magazines oriented entirely toward the very wealthy. Absolute Publishing, the Times noted, had just started up a publication called Absolute, “for distribution to New Yorkers with an estimated annual household income of at least $500,000.” The editor of Absolute, Ernest J, Renzulli, is aiming for an audience of only 60,000 New York residents. He found his target readership “by winnowing databases of the most affluent New York ZIP codes with people who have bought houses for more than $2 million and people who have registered cars, boats or planes that cost more than $75,000.” “It’s a small number,” the Times quoted Mr. Renzulli as saying. “But this is not a magazine that’s about mass reach. It’s about reaching the tip of the pyramid.” The Times take note of Michael Silverstein, an executive with the Boston Consulting Group and co-author of Trading Up: The New American Luxury. Silverstein estimates that by 2010 Americans will spend $1 trillion on luxury goods. The Times continues: “In an ever more fragmented media world, the rich are becoming their own niche. They may be diverse connoisseurs of fashion, yachting or jewelry, but they share one important trait: a seemingly bottomless supply of disposable income.” It must indeed be a predicament to be saddled with tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars, or more—how is one to spend such sums? Those “awash in cash” (the Times’ phrase) must rack their brains and devote hours to the problem. How could one ever rest? Would not a person require a certain degree of inventiveness to come up with ways of spending such a fortune? Judging by the results in published reports—no, not particularly. By and large, the fabulously wealthy have derived their fortunes from inheritance, the stock market, the real estate bubble, fortunate investments in technology or, perhaps, American militarism: in short, from semi-automatic economic and social processes associated with the lowering of living standards for millions in the US and the super-exploitation of masses of people in impoverished countries in other parts of the world. They are not startling or outstanding in any fashion, except perhaps in the depth of their greed and shortsightedness.So we learn that Microsoft’s Paul Allen owns a $250-million, 414-foot “gigayacht,” with seven decks, two helicopter landing pads, a swimming pool, a basketball court, an infirmary, a garage for Land Rovers, a movie theater, a concert space for 260 and a recording studio. Not to be outdone, Larry Ellison of software giant Oracle had his giant yacht built 452 feet long. Ellison’s vessel has five stories, 82 rooms, “a wine cellar the size of most beach bungalows, a dozen yacht-length tenders, and a generator capable of providing enough electricity for a small town in Idaho or Maine... Final cost: $377 million.” (Associated Press) The wealthy elite are also purchasing their own widebody airplanes, reports Business Week—Airbus A340s and Boeing 777s, which list for over $100 million—as “airborne penthouses.” Customized outfitting may add $25 to $30 million to the cost. The “supercar” business is also thriving. Ocean Drive, one of the new magazines aimed at the affluent, carries a piece on Michael Fux, whose Sleep Innovations manufactures Memory Foam products. Fux has collected some 50 luxury cars. He recently took possession of a $2 million Ferrari FXX, one of only 20 in the world. USA Today, in a piece describing the new “super-rich supercar fanatics” who collect Ferraris and Maseratis and Bugattis, cites the comments of one auto broker in southern California, “There’s a whole new breed of collector that has emerged in the last three-four years. Almost all make the kind of money you cannot comprehend.” Yet great unease persists in these circles. A yacht broker told Associated Press that “a sea change in attitude among America’s superrich” has taken place in the wake of September 11. “Clients are telling me, ‘Hey, I could have been in the Twin Towers. That could have been me jumping out a window.’ The thinking among wealthy people now is, you can die anytime. Nobody can protect you. So you might as well spend your money now and enjoy it.” Likewise, in its analysis of the trends driving the purchase of jumbo jets by wealthy individuals, Business Week notes: “Because of increased concern over security, especially post-September 11, some businesspeople now use their aircraft as a base of operations on overseas business trips. Rather than going to a hotel or office after landing, they just stay onboard... “ The term “conspicuous consumption,” coined by Thorstein Veblen in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), hardly does justice to the current situation. There is a considerable element of recklessness, even desperation, in the obsessive spending. Throwing money to the wind hardly speaks to a sense of historic optimism or confidence among the elite in its own future or the general health of the American social order. At the height of US global economic hegemony, in the 1950s, corporate directors were expected to lead rather sedate lives, modestly tending to the nation’s economy. Of course they lined their pockets, but they were not expected to live like pharaohs. In 1957, Fortune magazine reported that some 250 or so individuals in the US were worth $50 million or more. The wealthiest of them, oil tycoon J. Paul Getty, stood all alone in the $700 million to $1 billion category. The equivalent of $50 million today—some $350 million—would not place an individual anywhere near the richest 400 people in the US, according to Forbes’s 2005 list (which begins at $900 million). Getty would find himself somewhere between 31st and 42nd on the list. The roll call of the wealthiest Americans a half-century ago included famous names—Rockefeller, Harriman, Mellon, duPont, Astor, Whitney and Ford, along with a quartet associated with General Motors, Alfred P. Sloan Jr., Charles F. Kettering, John L. Pratt and Charles S. Mott. These were all ruthless capitalists, but their fortunes were based, directly or indirectly, on the growth of the productive forces. Today, the list of the super-rich reveals an extraordinary growth of parasitism. One indication is Forbes’ listing of the “400,” which includes an extraordinary number of people whose wealth, according to the publication, is derived from “Investments,” “Hedge Funds,” “Leveraged buyouts,” “Real estate,” “Fashion,” etc. The “captains of industry” of old are few and far between. A perusal of publications such as Ocean Drive, or Gotham, or Los Angeles Confidential sheds some light on the current tastes and opinions of these very rich. Real estate expert Steven Gaines told Gotham in a recent interview, “where you choose to live [in New York City] defines you more than in any other city. There’s a right side and a wrong side of the tracks in every city; but in New York, what floor you live on, which direction your apartment faces, whether you move one block in either direction, says a tremendous amount about who you are and your personal sense of adventure.” Asked about co-op boards rejecting celebrities, Gaines replied, “I haven’t heard of any juicy rejections lately. Celebrity rejections are very 90s; they don’t really happen anymore. People are very impressed by money; that’s all it takes now. Also—and this is the most important thing—they’re not building any more [co-ops]. We don’t need any more because people don’t really care who their neighbors are. [Most people] figure that if a guy can afford a $12 million apartment in the Time Warner building, he’s cool enough to live next door.” This theme—money is absolutely everything—recurs again and again in studies of the contemporary American elite. The Times reporter, Katharine Q. Seelye, in her piece on magazines for the affluent, described the publications in these words: “Most of the magazines rely on a similar formula: extravagantly lush photography on heavy paper stock, flattering feature articles on prominent local personalities and snapshots of those personalities hobnobbing with each other... The magazines also make it easy for readers to buy what they see on the page, whether it appears in an advertisement or an article—and it is often difficult to tell the difference, as the magazines have elevated commercial product placement to an art form.” The magazines appear at first glance to be nothing but expensive advertisements for clothes, watches, condos and automobiles—hundreds of pages of them (Los Angeles Confidential runs to 350 pages, Ocean Drive an astonishing 530!). The table of contents, gossip columns and articles, such as they are, do little to distinguish themselves. They humbly give way to the full-color photos of handbags and bracelets and motorcars. Such a magazine is merely a scaffolding for the marketing of highly expensive products. It is a relatively convenient means of making known to a specific clientele what is available for them to purchase this month. And this is not something that those involved would be ashamed to admit. No, we have moved far beyond that. Gotham appears to specialize in real estate gossip, appropriate in Manhattan, which has been ruined by the Trumps and their ilk. Tales of apartment and co-op buying and selling are recounted with relish, with the sort of sensual zest that others might take in relating stories of sexual improprieties. In a recent issue, one piece excitedly recounts that “the penthouse apartment of the late philanthropist Enid Haupt has sold—at least three times. The nine-room duplex at 740 Park Avenue, with two principal bedrooms and three-and-a-half baths, has an accepted offer for its asking price of $27.5 million, with two backup bids—in case the famously persnickety co-op board decides to reject the winning bidder.” In another column, we learn that “Out in the Hamptons [on Long Island], entrepreneur Linda Wachner is listing her seaside estate for a sky-high $62.5 million, the highest price ever asked for a Southampton Village home. The ocean- and bay-front Southampton estate on Meadow Lane features a 16-room, two-story shingled traditional mansion measuring nearly 10,000 square feet with 10 bedrooms, 14 bathrooms, several public rooms, a wine cellar, and staff quarters. The property includes several hundred feet of beachfront, a rose garden, a putting green, a pool with spa, and a tennis court with a pavilion. ‘I think it’s an exciting property,’ Wachner told the New York Post. ‘We’ve had a lot of fun here.’”
Unique Homes reports that the Stanhope, on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, is currently being renovated into 26 luxury residences. “The space is divided into half-floor residences of approximately 4,000 square feet (starting at $10 million) and full-floor residences measuring 8,000-plus square feet ($30.5 million and up).” The old Plaza Hotel is also being transformed by a developer into private residences, 182 of them. The one- to five-bedroom units will be priced between $2.5 million and $33 million-plus.
The wealthy pockets of south Florida are targeted in Ocean Drive. The size of a small telephone book, the magazine seems desperate to please and impress. It takes the most ridiculously self-serious attitude toward trivial people and circumstances. Page after page of attractive but glum models dominate the publication, a cornucopia of expensive consumerism.
Stiff competition between real estate projects is very much in evidence here. Three operations, Donald Trump’s “Trump Hollywood” (i.e., Hollywood, Florida), St. Regis Resort & Residences, Bal Harbour and Icon Brickell, with “breathtaking views of Biscayne Bay,” have included their own elaborate, pull-out brochures in the magazine.
The St. Regis is especially noteworthy for its quite conscious effort to evoke an imaginary aristocratic past. It employs butlers. Here is the advertisement for that service, a disgusting passage over which some wretched soul expended a great deal of effort:
“The St. Regis Butlers are adept at executing your requests while anticipating your every need with consummate style. Every preference is committed to memory. Dinner for two on the beach at seven-thirty? Shirt collars heavily starched? A car to retrieve your business partner from the airport tomorrow morning? It’s a pleasure. Your St. Regis Butler, always on call, is your household manager, your link to St. Regis services and your master of conveniences. All embrace the authority to go to any lengths to ensure you the utmost in comfort, down to the most particular request.” A butler...or an indentured servant, a serf, a slave?
One could go on, but the outlines are clear. A type of aristocracy rules America, which has more than one feature in common with the ancien régime that presided over pre-revolutionary France. This vast accumulation of wealth at one pole of society is incompatible, in the long run, with even the trappings of democracy. The super-rich own everything in the US, including the political parties and the political process. They allow the population to vote at this point, more or less. But for how long? As resistance to the policies of the elite mounts and the two-party monopoly threatens to crumble, why should the riffraff be permitted a say in such important affairs as elections?
Source: www.wsws.org/articles/2006/apr2006/rich-a19.shtml
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michelle
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Post by michelle on Apr 24, 2006 15:59:53 GMT 4
On Corruption, Reform and Aid: A Response to the World Bank4/23/2006 5:06:00 PM To: National and International desks Contact: Sandy Krawitz, 202-492-7207, sandy.krawitz@actionaid.org or Gillian Sanford (in the UK),(011) 44 7753-973486, (011) 44 208-670-8463, (011) 44 208-670-9967, gillian.sandford@actionaid.org - both of ActionAid International WASHINGTON, April 23 /U.S. Newswire/ -- World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz today stressed the importance of addressing corruption in promoting development, and urged for more action on this issue from both donors and aid recipients. Here's what ActionAid International had to say: On Corruption Says Victorine Kemonou Djitrinou, ActionAid International Education Advocacy Coordinator, "The Bank is right to emphasize the importance of good governance. But this should not be used as an excuse to add layers of unfair conditions which often undermine democracy and sovereignty. It's the citizens of poor countries, not unelected Washington bureaucrats, who can best make sure that money is well spent. Says Romilly Greenhill Senior Policy Officer, ActionAid International UK: "It takes two to tango. Rich countries must do much more to make sure that their companies are not exporting corruption to the developing world." Says Amanda Sserumunga, director, ActionAid Uganda: "Aid can help to tackle corruption. In Uganda, local organizations are training children in how to monitor their teachers to make sure that money is spent on books and classrooms, rather than lining the pockets of officials." Why isn't World Bank Reform on the Agenda? Says Romilly Greenhill, Senior Policy Officer, ActionAid International UK: "The World Bank loves to preach 'good governance' to poor countries, but it needs to get its own house in order. The Bank is deeply undemocratic: Its leadership is selected by the world's richest country, while the conditions it attaches to foreign aid often undermine democracy and sovereignty in the developing world. It's time for some spring cleaning." Why isn't more aid going to the countries that need it most? Says Rick Rowden, Policy Officer, ActionAid International USA: "Aid must go to the countries that need it most. The Bank's own figures show that over 60 percent of the increase in aid worldwide between 2001 and 2004 went to Iraq, Afghanistan and Congo - yet these countries account for only 3 percent of the world's poor." On HIV/AIDS and Conditionality Rick Rowden, Policy Officer, ActionAid International USA: "The IMF says it's concerned about HIV/AIDS, yet the lending conditions they impose on poor countries keep public spending so low that they can't afford to hire the doctors and nurses they need. In order to do something about this pandemic, these policies must be readdressed immediately." On Haiti and Debt Reduction Jean-Claude Fignole, ActionAid International, Haiti: "Haiti is the poorest country in the Americas. While on the surface, debt relief sounds promising, it doesn't come without strings, and that's what worries me. The conditions imposed by institutions like the IMF often come at the expense of the poor, and the poor of our country have nothing left to give."On Education and the IMF Victorine Kemonou Djitrinou, ActionAid International Education Advocacy Coordinator: "The hopes of millions of parents and children rests on the results of meetings like this. Unfortunately, we haven't seen much progress at all on their behalf. Instead, hopes are once again delayed, far too many kids remain out of school, and desperation grows." Romilly Greenhill, ActionAid Senior Policy Officer, ActionAid International: "The IMF claims that its concerned about getting more children into school, however its lending programs include economic policies that prevent countries from spending what they need on education. Unless these policies are seriously reformed, we'll wind up seeing more understaffed, overcrowded classrooms as the quality of education suffers." On IMF Reform Rick Rowden, Policy Officer, ActionAid International USA: "I hope that the reforms offered by the IMF on giving developing countries more voice and vote on their Executive Board won't be tantamount to the European monarchies sensing that the democratic revolutions were coming, and saying 'we'll give you some power but keep our crown.' In order for the IMF to be truly democratic, all voices must count equally." --- ActionAid International works in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas to fight global poverty and tackle the injustice and inequity that cause it. For more information, visit www.actionaidusa.org.
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michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
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Post by michelle on Apr 27, 2006 14:35:40 GMT 4
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michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
Posts: 2,100
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Post by michelle on May 2, 2006 0:49:39 GMT 4
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michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
Posts: 2,100
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Post by michelle on May 2, 2006 19:44:21 GMT 4
The US dollar on reprieve The Asian Development Bank warns of threatening monetary turmoil The oil trade is uneasy about the increasing impossibility of reinvesting the petrodollars they are accumulating, whereas the bank world is pondering over the dollar’s real value. A downturn in trade has just begun on the stock exchanges of the Gulf, even as the Asian Development Bank was warning its members against a possible collapse of the US currency . What if the dollar was really no longer anything but fiat money?For several months a lively debate has been developing within international financial circles: is the dollar so overvalued as to be at risk of a brutal collapse, on the order of 15 to 40% depending on the commentator? The controversy is kept alive by a disputed rumour whereby some oil contracts might be on the verge of being converted from dollars into euros. This, in turn, would spawn a depreciation of the US currency. Until now, official statements on this issue seemed to belong to the realm of psychological warfare between rival powers. As such, they were subject to question. But suddenly, on March 28th, 2006, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) chose to put its credibility at stake among its members by issuing a memo advising them to be ready for a collapse of the dollar. In the same note, the ADB specifies that there is a certain degree of uncertainty as to whether this might happen or not, but that the immediate consequences would be severe if it were to happen [1]. The ADB is already in the process of working on the creation of a regional alternative to the dollar – the ACU, a basket of currencies modelled on the principles of the European ECU. The ADB was founded as an institution by sixty-four national states. Contrary to what its name might otherwise suggest, its member states are not only countries from Asia and the Pacific Rim, but also countries from the South Sea Islands, North America and Europe (including France, Belgium and Switzerland). It is controlled in equal parts by Japan and the USA, owning 15% each. This makes the ADB’s warning of an impending monetary turmoil all the more significant. In spite of being located in Asia, the countries of the Persian Gulf are not members of the ADB. Six of them have preferred to set up their own regional organization, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). They are actively putting efforts into bringing their economies closer together with the aim of creating a single currency on the model of the euro. The project’s aim is not to give in to the fads of our time; rather, it is a response to a particular need. These countries’ oil reserves are declining [2] and, accordingly, there is no question of their reinvesting their petrodollars into the development and modernisation of their oil infrastructure - only maintenance needs to be taken care of. They only want to reinvest their dollars in the US, or to convert them into other currencies in order to reinvest them in other countries. In the latter case, the conversion of such large monetary assets would have dramatic consequences on the dollar and on the US economy. Thus, everyone is looking for a solution to the problem that is agreeable to all parts involved. Yet, the US, which produces increasingly fewer consumer goods, is in need of extensive and highly lucrative investments in order to expand its imports of manufactured goods from China. This is why the Gulf states have resolved, on the one hand, to endow themselves with the world’s most impressive air cargo fleet and, on the other hand, to buy and develop the six largest commercial ports in the US. This was a convenient solution for the Bush administration, which was already working together with the United Arab Emirate consortium Dubai Ports World, whose Jebel Ali shipping terminal serves as a hub for the flow of military cargo towards Afghanistan and Iraq. Nevertheless, US congressmen, who believe in those Bush administration fairy tales that characterize all muslims as terrorists, have been frightened by the idea of surrendering their ports to Dubai Ports World. In the name of their national security phantasms, they have demanded that the consortium’s assets be relinquished to a US group that would manage them on behalf of the Emirates - a scheme which, needless to say, was bound to be rejected by the latter, as they would stand to lose most of the return on their investment and perhaps even the whole of it at some point in the future. Oil traders are increasingly reluctant to entrust investment funds with their money. They know that international accounting standards have been modified in such a manner that nowadays, both national states and multinational corporations have assets they do not own entered in their balance-sheets. The shares they hold are being posted in their accounting, not at the purchase price, but at the actual stock quotation. While this is of no consequence at times when markets are on the rise, it will prove fatal in the case of a stock market crash. From one day to the next, central banks and major corporations could find themselves completely ruined. The Gulf countries, therefore, are trying as a matter of course to invest their money in Europe. This should lead them to converting their dollars into euros, to the USA’s great detriment. In this context, Sultan Al Suweidi, the governor of the Central Bank of the United Arab Emirates, has announced on March 22nd, 2006 that he was considering the conversion into euros of 10% of the bank’s dollar reserves, and his Saudi counterpart, Saud Al Sayyari, publicly condemned the decision of the US House of Representatives in the Dubai Ports World affair [3]. These decisions are being taken even as some of the oil-producing countries, with whom Washington has entered into a state of latent conflict, are in the process of diverting their capital flows to invest them outside of the dollar zone. This is the case of Syria, which has gradually been converting its reserves into euros during the past two years [4]. It is also the case of the recent rapprochement between Venezuela and the Vatican Bank for the purpose of exchanging the oil-producing country’s dollars, mainly into euros and Chinese yuan. Above all, this could well be the case with Iran. As a matter of fact, rumours are multiplying that the Islamic Republic is about to open an oil exchange in euros [5]. This project, announced for March, has not yet seen the light of day, and has been called propaganda by numerous commentators. We have attempted to verify its existence with the authorities in Tehran. At first, they refused to either confirm or deny the information, but later, special advisor to Iran’s Oil Minister Mohammad Asemipur declared that the project would be brought to completion in spite of the typical delays when realizing this type of endeavour [6]. The Oil Bourse in euros will be established on Kish, a small island in the Persian Gulf turned by Iran into a free trade zone. Oil corporations TotalFinaElf (France) et Agip (Italy) have already set up their regional headquarters on Kish. Be that as it may, the Bourse will only handle a small portion of Iran’s energy markets. Substantial contracts have already been signed between national states: with China for the sale of crude oil [7], and with Indonesia for oil refining [8]. To counter this activity, Washington is betting on natural gas, the role of which, as we all know, is bound to be strengthened by the growing scarcity of oil. The Bush administration has encouraged Qatar – which hosts CENTCOM, the US Central Command’s Deployable Headquarters and which holds the world’s third largest reserves of natural gas – to lay the foundations for a gigantic "Energy City". $2.6 bn. are to be invested for the purpose of attracting the energy market’s global actors to a gas exchange in dollars [9]. Microsoft has already offered to provide for the bourse’s electronic brokerage infrastructure. For his part, Norwegian Bourse director Sven Arild Andersen is studying the possibility of creating an oil exchange priced in euros in his country, which would compete advantageously with the City of London [10]. As a matter of fact, as British oil production is slumping (minus 8% in 2005), the weight of the City’s influence is appearing increasingly disproportionate. The ADB warning of a pending monetary turmoil will undoubtedly bring about a hastening of all this large-scale scheming. Independent of the oil trade’s reasoning with regard to the possibilities of reinvesting petrodollars, the banking sector is also concerned with the real value of today’s dollar. One might remember that the US were not able to finance their war effort in Vietnam for very long. Mired in a conflict without end, they resolved to let their allies bear the brunt of the situation, and, in 1971, they stopped guaranteeing their currency’s gold convertibility. From then on, its value has only been resting on the confidence placed in it. The dollar is no longer supported by the economy of the issuing country, but by the economies of those utilizing dollar reserves; banks, however, are able to verify the currency’s adequacy using the M-3, an annual indicator which establishes the volume of greenbacks in circulation. Presently, the USA is bogged down in Iraq and is incapable of financing its military occupation there. The only way it can pay its suppliers is to keep the printing press running. The announcement, late in March 2006, that the publication of the M-3 indicator would be suspended, together with all the sub-indicators which could have made feasible its reconstruction by aggregates, means that the actual volume of dollars in circulation has become a secret that cannot be divulged. It is no longer possible to precisely evaluate the currency’s real value. Through a cascading effect, the US are also concealing the costs of their presence in Iraq in order to hide the size of the fraud they are committing. Refusing to cover up for an escapist monetary policy which sooner or later is bound to lead to a catastrophe comparable to 1929, several senior officials of the FED, the US Federal Reserve, have tendered their resignations [11]. In an interview to the German weekly Der Spiegel, Nobel Prize Laureate in Economics Joseph Stiglitz has estimated the real budget of the US war effort in Iraq to be in range of $1 to $2 trillion over the first four years [12], in other words two to four times higher than the official figures. The hidden part of the war budget thus stands at $500 billion to $1.5 trillion. This sum, if it were to be publicly accounted for, would have to be added to the US public deficit, which is already soaring at over $400 billion per year. It is being absorbed by the printing of worthless paper dollars. In a true market economy, this use of the Mint would lead to a corresponding depreciation of the currency. For the past three weeks, signs of a bear market have begun to make their appearance on the Gulf Bourses [13]. From now on, any political crisis could trigger a panic on the international markets. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Source: www.voltairenet.org/article138048.htmlALSO ON LINE:[1] "Asia must prepare for dollar collapse", Al Jazeera with AFP, March 28, 2006. [2] For further details on the "oil peak" phenomenon, see "The Power of Oil in the 21st Century", by Arthur Lepic and Jack Naffair, Voltaire, May 10, 2004. [3] "UAE, Saudi considering to move reserves out of dollar", Middle East Forex News, March 22nd, 2006. [4] "Syria switches from dollars to euros", Associated Press, February 14th, 2006. [5] "L’Iran va lancer une place d’échanges pétroliers alternative... en euros", Voltaire, February 10th, 2005. [6] "Iranian oil exchange is ‘on hold’ ", by Jim Willie, Kitco, March 21st, 2006. [7] See in particular "Iran allies with China to face the United States", Voltaire, November 17th, 2004 and "The India-Iran Alliance", Voltaire, February 17th, 2005. [8] "Indonesia, Iran to sign multi-billion-dollar investment deal in refinery", Xinhuanet via Tehran Times, March 14th, 2006. [9] «Qatar to build ’Energy city’», Emirates News Agency, May 5th, 2005. [10] "Norwegian Bourse Director wants oil bourse – priced in Euros", by Laila Bakken and Petter Halvorsen, NRK via Energy Bulletin, December 27th, 2005. [11] "Is the federal reserve preparing for Iran?", by Robert McHugh, February 26th, 2006. [12] "The War Is Bad for the Economy", Der Spiegel, April 5th, 2006. [13] « Black Tuesday : Mideast stock markets nosedive », Middle East Online, March 14th, 2006.
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michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
Posts: 2,100
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Post by michelle on May 4, 2006 19:33:43 GMT 4
The True Picture of World Oil Reserves"Keep in mind there are fueless energy technologies and no shortage of oil, just a shortage of integrity and an abundance of greed."Karl W B Schwarz kwbschwarz2@snet.net> wrote: This email will come as a shock to those aficionados of Peak Oil. There is no shortage of oil, just a shortage of truth coming from the people who are so greedy they cannot get out of the stuck-on- stupid mode. Back in December I sent out an email update that reduced 9-11 down to three simple issues. Quoting from that email: "For those interested in the underlying reasons we have invaded Iraq, the document available at that link and the two books Neoconned and Neoconned Again will give you the information needed to understand the bigger picture. My book One-Way Ticket to Crawford, Texas provides even more background and proof that the true terrorists and the true enemies of Americans are the Republican National Committee and Democratic National Committee and their wealthy elite masters. It is really quite simple: · The U.S. goal of remaining the only military Superpower with even regional powers eliminated; and · The U.S. insistence that all oil sales will be in petro-dollars, not the Euro; and · The U.S. intent to dominate the world oil and gas supplies because that will ensure that oil sales will remain denominated in dollars, not Euro. Whomever controls the oil and gas can control entire economies by denying energy supplies. The US policy of growing our economy by increasing the National Debt would not be possible if the Euro becomes the world's trading currency for oil. Hence, Iran and Venezuela are terrorists since they intend to trade in Euros. Saddam saw that even the UN Oil for Food program to Iraq was run through France and denominated in Euros. If the Euro becomes the oil trade currency our economy would melt down in a year or less." I look at 9-11 as merely a means to implement policies that Americans would not have otherwise endorsed. It really is that simple. Before 9-11 there is not a single thing George W. Bush could have said or done to get Americans riled up enough to attack Afghanistan. It was a 'Pearl Harbor' event, so Americans would support the war and go back to not paying attention to what our government and major corporations are really up to. BOO! They want Americans to remain very afraid and looking to the Neocons for protection. Wake up — your life and your future are being plundered!Note that they still have not said a word about Bridas Corporation. No one has written more about that than I have and I will continue to point to that hidden reason and hidden agenda. Bridas Corporation was years ahead of US oil companies in controlling that vast supply of oil in the former USSR by controlling the pipeline access to get it to the oceans. The Clinton Administration and the Bush Administration beat up on Bridas Corporation for many years before 9-11 happened to block them from succeeding. Bridas Corporation did not win $500 million in a US Court of Appeals based on some arcane principle. They won because they proved massive amounts of interference in contracts towards what they already had agreements on. That is one of the primary reasons that South America, especially Argentina, Brazil and Venezuela, are rejecting US policies that attempt to dominate them. Bad policies do not sell well and DC has become nothing but bad policies over the past three presidential administrations. Our presidents do not serve the American people, they serve commerce, the Wealthy Elite and major corporate interests.I look at the Depleted Uranium matter in its simplest terms as being an incredibly inhumane byproduct of our idiotic policies. They know it is deadly and have known since the 1940s, yet they expose people to it and then ignore what they have done. They really could not care less how many they kill with DU. It is a means to de-populate and get rid of useless eaters, to quote Henry Kissinger. Those resources belong to the Wealthy Elite! Did you not get the memo? In another email update in November, I disclosed a little known report that shows that Venezuela may well be sitting on the single largest oil reserve in the world at a whopping 4 trillion barrels of heavy crude oil. That trading in Euros is scary indeed, but it is the policies of our government that has undermined the value of the US dollar and made that happen so they must go after any Euro-Terrorist. Saddam Hussein traded in Euros and look at what they wrought. Iran is trading in Euros and even opening up an Oil Bourse to trade in Euros. Watch the disinformation from DC. Venezuela is trading in Euros so that makes him a terrorist too. Hugo Chavez might even make DC have to change their style of robbing you and me. Venezuela, according to some arcane reports, sits on four trillion barrels of heavy crude. That is not a typo. Venezuela has reported reserves of FOUR TRILLION barrels of oil. www.radford.edu/~wkovarik/oil/oilcharts.htmlFigure 1 — A Different view of world oil supplies The Bush Administration launched a war to take over the Caspian Basin, that contains oil reserves estimated at a mere 200 billion barrels, or a thirty-year supply of oil. That war was to take over the country with a pipeline that is needed to get crude oil to the ocean ports, where it can be shipped to refineries abroad. An upcoming email update addresses all of the facts surrounding those matters. If this report is accurate, Venezuela alone has roughly four times the amount of oil in all of the Middle East. You can see what our policies about that oil have done in the way of insane policies from our government. The following map ( see at www.radford.edu/~wkovarik/oil/oilcharts.html ) is British Petroleum's version of oil reserves and note the huge difference stated for South America. Figure 2 — British Petroleum statement of World Oil Reserves You might have heard of the Peak Oil theory developed by scientists and analysts in government and the oil industry. Mike Ruppert discusses these ideas in his book Crossing the Rubicon. Peak Oil might have plausible arguments to support it, but there are many vested interests that want us to think that prices have to escalate because the world's oil supply is too small in comparison with demand. That is somewhat akin to using a stock tout to change the price of something that should not be changing except that some vested interests want it to change so they can charge more for it. I have seen clear evidence that talk of terrorism is a device used to create an artificial spook in the oil markets and to drive up the price of oil further. Every "Orange Alert" pushed up the price and every one of those alerts proved to be questionable. Even Tom Ridge stated publicly after he left the Bush Administration that he was pressured to raise the terror alert level. The Peak Oil theory might be a myth created to drive up the price of oil and gas, and here is why I state it that way. Another factor that might be driving the "synthetic belligerence" towards Chavez is that he and the People's Republic of China [PRC] recently entered into long term agreements for Venezuela to supply oil to the PRC. They have even made arrangements to build a pipeline from Venezuela to the west coast of Panama to facilitate shipping of the oil in tankers too large to go through the Panama Canal. The financing deal on that pipeline was done about six months ago by someone that I know personally. If Bush, Cheney and the oil companies that pull their strings truly are trying to dominate and control the world's petroleum supplies, that "unpardonable sin" by Chavez might be all the reason they needed to try to take over Venezuela, assassinate Chavez as suggested by Pat Robertson, or otherwise try to punish Venezuela for not playing along. Venezuela is one of the few countries denominating their sales of oil in the Euro and that 4 trillion barrels of oil denominated to the Euro is bad news for DC. They would have to exercise fiscal sanity and sane fiscal policy for a change and that means their buddies cannot steal as much from the US Treasury in the future. You can imagine how desperate they are to maintain that status quo. It is definitely something worth thinking about and holding our leaders accountable for, since they seem to think that everything has to be so secret. Of course they want us to think that the Middle East is so valuable and strategic. It is not. It is just strategic to the Zionists and our oil companies. Making the Middle East so strategic is consistent with their policies. The reason for this email is what follows. Meria Heller (http://www.meria.net ) sent this to me and asked what I thought about it. I gave her the short answer and this email is the long answer. From: www.stansberryonline.com/OIL/20060405-OIL-COL.asp?pcode=EOILG422&alias=200604OILU.S. Oil Discovery- Largest Reserve in the World! Stansberry Report Online 4/20/2006 Hidden 1,000 feet beneath the surface of the Rocky Mountains lies the largest untapped oil reserve in the world — more than 2 TRILLION barrels. On August 8, 2005 President Bush mandated its extraction. Three companies have been chosen to lead the way. Test drilling has already begun. Five months ago, the U.S. Energy Department announced the results of a land survey. They reported this stunning news: We have more oil inside our borders, than all the other proven reserves on earth. Here are the official estimates: 8-times as much oil as Saudi : Arabia 18-times as much oil as Iraq 21-times as much oil as : Kuwait 22-times as much oil as Iran 500-times as much oil : as Yemen. And it's all right here in the Western United : States. James Bartis, lead researcher with the study says, "We've got more oil in this very compact area than the entire Middle East." More than 2 TRILLION barrels. Untapped. "That's more than all the proven oil reserves of crude oil in the world today," reports The Denver Post. When asked about America's least-publicized oil supply, Utah Senator Orrin Hatch said: "The amounts of oil are staggering. Who would have guessed that in just Colorado and Utah, there is more recoverable oil than in the Middle East?" Three million barrels of oil per day. That translates into more than $20 BILLION a year. These are the conservative estimates. The U.S. Energy Dept. estimates an eventual output of 10 million barrels of oil per day. At that rate, the money flow would be even greater. It is a safe bet that they discovered this oil years ago and are just now getting around to telling us about it. There were policies they wanted to put into play, like taking over the Caspian Basin oil so Russia and the PRC would not be able to use that 200 billion barrels against us as an economic weapon. As most know now, Bush planned to take over Iraq in his first Cabinet meeting. The 20 Year War Plan identified over 20 nations to take over, and each having vast supplies of oil and gas. As far back as the George H W Bush Administration they planned to take over the Caspian Basin in Operation Steppe Shield. The 20 Year War Plan desired by the Neocons and Zionists, and Big Defense, Big Banks and Big Oil was concocted under the Clinton Administration. You see, if one controls the energy they can control national economies of other countries. They can even control and crush us as they are doing now with high gasoline and energy prices. Sooner or later, in savior fashion, they will tell you about the vast pools of oil under the Ouachita Mountains in West Arkansas and Eastern Oklahoma that are down about 30,000 to 35,000 feet and has been known about for over 20 years. The oil crisis is a fraud folks. It is all about control and US domination of world commerce through military might and control of the majority of oil and natural gas. They are using terrorism and other artificial means to pump up the prices and rip money out of your pocket and out of the economy. It is greed running rampant and a government in DC that sees nothing wrong with that since those huge campaign donations will keep flowing in. All a politician has to do is support certain policies and they are assured of massive money for their continued stay in office. Our government and our oil companies are at this very time waging economic warfare against the American people and it is time to show them the door and put a stop to it. This is an election year — do not for your own sake send a single incumbent back to Washington, DC.Best regards, Karl MORE INFO:From: www.dailywealth.com/archive/print/2006/apr/2006_apr_14.htmlThe Next American Oil Boomby Matt Badiali There’s a new source of oil in the American West. Today, this gigantic oil deposit sits idle — untapped — inside more than 16,000 square miles of a special kind of rock under Wyoming, Colorado, and Utah. There’s an interesting story about this rock. It’s about a cowboy who spent all summer building a cabin for the winter. He chinked the cracks with mud and built a big fireplace out of local stone. The first cold night, he built a roaring fire, and the stones of his fireplace burned down the cabin! The cowboy built his fireplace out of oil shale… Oil shale is full of kerogen, which is like immature oil. You can’t blame the old cowboy… at first glance, oil shale looks like an ordinary black rock. It feels grainy to the touch and… greasy. But as he found out the hard way, oil shale is full of crude oil… And although you don’t hear much about oil shale, this form of “unconventional oil” has the potential to be one of America’s major sources of petroleum for the next few generations. I’m writing to you today because knowing how to invest in oil shale could make you great returns in the next few years. But first, let’s go over a quick history of oil shale. The first recorded use of oil shale in America is by the Ute Indians, as they described it as “a rock that burns.” In the U.S., oil shale begins to look attractive every time conventional oil gets expensive. In the 1850’s, early oil shale entrepreneurs were upstaged by the first oil well in Titusville, Pennsylvania. After all, why mess with squeezing oil from rocks if the stuff will gush from a hole in the ground?
In the 1940s, renewed interest in oil shale was crushed by the unlimited potential of nuclear energy and the discovery of huge oil fields in the Middle East…As a result of the price spikes of the 70s, oil shale became a serious business among the majors… modern-day boomtowns sprung up as a result of renewed oil shale interest. But as booms and busts go, the price of oil dropped soon after, and by 1991, the last major company pulled out, with no return to show for the massive amount of capital spent. There’s a good reason people keep returning to the oil shale deposits… The reason? This area - the Green River Formation - contains 2 trillion barrels of oil. It can be difficult to imagine such massive amounts of oil. Below, I’ve included a page of the Energy Department’s report that puts those reserves in perspective… and the money that can be made. See the Table at www.dailywealth.com/archive/print/2006/apr/2006_apr_14.htmlAs you can see from the table, you could even add together all the oil in the Middle East — and our reserves would still come out on top — 3-TIMES LARGER. When asked about America’s least-publicized oil supply, Utah Senator Orrin Hatch said: “The amounts of oil are staggering. Who would have guessed that in just Colorado and Utah, there is more recoverable oil than in the Middle East?” This past January, the government proceeded with the next step in the process. Three companies were each given 160 acres of the government's oil-rich land. The company with the cheapest, most environmentally sound drilling method will be granted full access to the government's oil mother lode. Combine all this with stubbornly high oil prices, and a new American oil shale boom may be on. Good Investing Matt Badiali P.S. I’ve spent every day of the past three months researching every possible way to make money with the massive U.S. oil shale supply. I’ve just finished compiling an in-depth research report detailing everything you need to know... If you want to get in on the American oil shale boom, your fortune may begin with my newest research report, The U.S. Government’s Secret Oil Supply: How to Make Money in the American Oil Shale Boom. Click here www.stansberryonline.com/OIL/20060405-OIL-COL.asp?pcode=EOILG422&alias=200604OIL to learn more --- See also:Oil shale (From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_shaleOil shale is a general term applied to a group of fine black to dark brown shales rich enough in organic material (called kerogen) to yield petroleum upon distillation. The kerogen in oil shale can be converted to oil through the chemical process of pyrolysis. During pyrolysis the oil shale is heated to 450–500 °C in the absence of air and the kerogen is converted to oil and separated out, a process called "retorting". Oil shale has also been burnt directly as a low-grade fuel. The United States Office of Naval Petroleum and Oil Shale Reserves estimates the world supply of oil shale at 1.6 trillion barrels of which 1–1.2 trillion barrels are in the United States [1]. This is comparable to the amount of remaining conventional oil reserves. Estonia, Russia, Brazil, and China currently mine oil shale, however production is declining due to economic and environmental factors. (...) Estimates vary as to how many barrels of oil are contained in oil shale reserves. The US Office of Naval Petroleum and Oil Shale Reserves estimates there are some 1.6 trillion barrels of oil contained in oil shales around the world, with 60–70% of reserves (1.0–1.2 trillion barrels) in the United States. Most US oil shale is concentrated in the Green River Formation in Wyoming, Utah and Colorado. These oil shale resources underlie a total area of 16,000 square miles (40,000 km). (...) ECONOMICS - Below forty dollars a barrel, oil-shale oil is not competitive with conventional crude oil. If the price of oil were to stay permanently over forty dollars a barrel (with no chance of declining, which could be the case if oil shale were to be exploited on a large enough scale), then companies would exploit oil shale. Generally, the oil shale has to be mined, transported, retorted, and then disposed of, so at least 40% of the energy value is consumed in production. Water is also needed to add hydrogen to the oil-shale oil before it can be shipped to a conventional oil refinery. The largest deposit of oil shale in the United States is in western Colorado (the Green River Shale deposits), a dry region with no surplus water. The oil shale can be ground into a slurry and transported via pipeline to a more suitable pre-refining location. During the oil crisis of the 1970s, people thought that oil supplies were peaking, expected oil prices to be around seventy dollars a barrel for some time to come, and invested huge amounts of money in refining oil shale — money that they lost. Because of the astronomical sums that were lost last time around there is considerable reluctance to invest in oil shale this time around. Investors are waiting to see if oil prices really will remain this high (in April 2006: US$75). Prices are rising because of increased demand in rapidly developing countries, particularly China. Will high prices result in the discovery of more oil, as happened in the seventies, or will alternatives to drilling for oil have to be developed? Investors, burnt badly in the 1980s for their enthusiasm of the seventies, are in no hurry to develop oil shale. Those who lost money then are inclined to believe that more oil will be found by and by. In 2005, Royal Dutch Shell announced that its in-situ extraction technology could be competitive at prices over $30/bbl [2]. A critical measure of the viability of oil shale is the ratio of energy used to produce the oil, compared to the energy returned (Energy Returned on Energy Invested - EROEI). Oil shale typically has a very low EROEI - Royal Dutch Shell reported a figure of about 3, one barrel of oil used for every three gained, on its recent in-situ development - Mahogany Research Project. This compares to a figure of typically 20 to 100 for conventional oil extraction. China is challenged severely by high oil prices. The Chinese government has sponsored a project to extract oil from shale. Environmental considerations - Surface-mining of oil shale deposits has all the normal environmental effects from open-pit mining. In addition, the pre-refining process to obtain crude oil generates ash, and the waste rock (a known carcinogen) must be disposed of. Oil shale rock expands by around 30% after processing due to a popcorn effect from the heating; this waste then needs disposal. Oil shale processing also requires water, which may be in short supply. The energy demands of blasting, transporting, crushing, heating the material, and then adding hydrogen, together with the safe disposal of huge quantities of waste material, are large. These inefficiencies, plus the cost of environmental restoration, mean that oil shale exploitation will only be economical when oil prices are high (and projected to remain so). Currently, the in-situ process is the most attractive proposition due to the reduction in standard surface environmental problems. However, in-situ processes do involve possible significant environmental costs to aquifers. Especially since current in-situ methods may require ice-capping or some other form of barrier to restrict the flow of the newly gained oil into the groundwater aquifers. Current extraction methods produce four times as much greenhouse gas as does conventional oil production.
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michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
Posts: 2,100
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Post by michelle on May 9, 2006 15:36:48 GMT 4
What is the Federal Reserve Bank (FED) and why do we have it?by Greg Hobbs November 1, 1999 The FED is a central bank. Central banks are supposed to implement a country's fiscal policies. They monitor commercial banks to ensure that they maintain sufficient assets, like cash, so as to remain solvent and stable. Central banks also do business, such as currency exchanges and gold transactions, with other central banks. In theory, a central bank should be good for a country, and they might be if it wasn't for the fact that they are not owned or controlled by the government of the country they are serving. Private central banks, including our FED, operate not in the interest of the public good but for profit. There have been three central banks in our nation's history. The first two, while deceptive and fraudulent, pale in comparison to the scope and size of the fraud being perpetrated by our current FED. What they all have in common is an insidious practice known as "fractional banking." Fractional banking or fractional lending is the ability to create money from nothing, lend it to the government or someone else and charge interest to boot. The practice evolved before banks existed. Goldsmiths rented out space in their vaults to individuals and merchants for storage of their gold or silver. The goldsmiths gave these "depositors" a certificate that showed the amount of gold stored. These certificates were then used to conduct business. In time the goldsmiths noticed that the gold in their vaults was rarely withdrawn. Small amounts would move in and out but the large majority never moved. Sensing a profit opportunity, the goldsmiths issued double receipts for the gold, in effect creating money (certificates) from nothing and then lending those certificates (creating debt) to depositors and charging them interest as well. Since the certificates represented more gold than actually existed, the certificates were "fractionally" backed by gold. Eventually some of these vault operations were transformed into banks and the practice of fractional banking continued. Keep that fractional banking concept in mind as we examine our first central bank, the First Bank of the United States (BUS). It was created, after bitter dissent in the Congress, in 1791 and chartered for 20 years. A scam not unlike the current FED, the BUS used its control of the currency to defraud the public and establish a legal form of usury. This bank practiced fractional lending at a 10:1 rate, ten dollars of loans for each dollar they had on deposit. This misuse and abuse of their public charter continued for the entire 20 years of their existence. Public outrage over these abuses was such that the charter was not renewed and the bank ceased to exist in 1811. The war of 1812 left the country in economic chaos, seen by bankers as another opportunity for easy profits. They influenced Congress to charter the second central bank, the Second Bank of the United States (SBUS), in 1816. The SBUS was more expansive than the BUS. The SBUS sold franchises and literally doubled the number of banks in a short period of time. The country began to boom and move westward, which required money. Using fractional lending at the 10:1 rate, the central bank and their franchisees created the debt/money for the expansion. Things boomed for a while, then the banks decided to shut off the debt/money, citing the need to control inflation. This action on the part of the SBUS caused bankruptcies and foreclosures. The banks then took control of the assets that were used as security against the loans. Closely examine how the SBUS engineered this cycle of prosperity and depression. The central bank caused inflation by creating debt/money for loans and credit and making these funds readily available. The economy boomed. Then they used the inflation which they created as an excuse to shut off the loans/credit/money. The resulting shortage of cash caused the economy to falter or slow dramatically and large numbers of business and personal bankruptcies resulted. The central bank then seized the assets used as security for the loans. The wealth created by the borrowers during the boom was then transferred to the central bank during the bust. And you always wondered how the big guys ended up with all the marbles. Now, who do you think is responsible for all of the ups and downs in our economy over the last 85 years? Think about the depression of the late '20s and all through the '30s. The FED could have pumped lots of debt/money into the market to stimulate the economy and get the country back on track, but did they? No; in fact, they restricted the money supply quite severely. We all know the results that occurred from that action, don't we? Why would the FED do this? During that period asset values and stocks were at rock bottom prices. Who do you think was buying everything at 10 cents on the dollar? I believe that it is referred to as consolidating the wealth. How many times have they already done this in the last 85 years? Do you think they will do it again? Just as an aside at this point, look at today's economy. Markets are declining. Why? Because the FED has been very liberal with its debt/credit/money. The market was hyper inflated. Who creates inflation? The FED. How does the FED deal with inflation? They restrict the debt/credit/money. What happens when they do that? The market collapses. Several months back, after certain central banks said they would be selling large quantities of gold, the price of gold fell to a 25-year low of about $260 per ounce. The central banks then bought gold. After buying at the bottom, a group of 15 central banks announced that they would be restricting the amount of gold released into the market for the next five years. The price of gold went up $75.00 per ounce in just a few days. How many hundreds of billions of dollars did the central banks make with those two press releases? Gold is generally considered to be a hedge against more severe economic conditions. Do you think that the private banking families that own the FED are buying or selling equities at this time? (Remember: buy low, sell high.) How much money do you think these FED owners have made since they restricted the money supply at the top of this last current cycle? Alan Greenspan has said publicly on several occasions that he thinks the market is overvalued, or words to that effect. Just a hint that he will raise interest rates (restrict the money supply), and equity markets have a negative reaction. Governments and politicians do not rule central banks, central banks rule governments and politicians. President Andrew Jackson won the presidency in 1828 with the promise to end the national debt and eliminate the SBUS. During his second term President Jackson withdrew all government funds from the bank and on January 8, 1835, paid off the national debt. He is the only president in history to have this distinction. The charter of the SBUS expired in 1836. Without a central bank to manipulate the supply of money, the United States experienced unprecedented growth for 60 or 70 years, and the resulting wealth was too much for bankers to endure. They had to get back into the game. So, in 1910 Senator Nelson Aldrich, then Chairman of the National Monetary Commission, in collusion with representatives of the European central banks, devised a plan to pressure and deceive Congress into enacting legislation that would covertly establish a private central bank. This bank would assume control over the American economy by controlling the issuance of its money. After a huge public relations campaign, engineered by the foreign central banks, the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 was slipped through Congress during the Christmas recess, with many members of the Congress absent. President Woodrow Wilson, pressured by his political and financial backers, signed it on December 23, 1913. The act created the Federal Reserve System, a name carefully selected and designed to deceive. "Federal" would lead one to believe that this is a government organization. "Reserve" would lead one to believe that the currency is being backed by gold and silver. "System" was used in lieu of the word "bank" so that one would not conclude that a new central bank had been created. In reality, the act created a private, for profit, central banking corporation owned by a cartel of private banks. Who owns the FED? The Rothschilds of London and Berlin; Lazard Brothers of Paris; Israel Moses Seif of Italy; Kuhn, Loeb and Warburg of Germany; and the Lehman Brothers, Goldman, Sachs and the Rockefeller families of New York. Did you know that the FED is the only for-profit corporation in America that is exempt from both federal and state taxes? The FED takes in about one trillion dollars per year tax free! The banking families listed above get all that money. Almost everyone thinks that the money they pay in taxes goes to the US Treasury to pay for the expenses of the government. Do you want to know where your tax dollars really go? If you look at the back of any check made payable to the IRS you will see that it has been endorsed as "Pay Any F.R.B. Branch or Gen. Depository for Credit U.S. Treas. This is in Payment of U.S. Oblig." Yes, that's right, every dime you pay in income taxes is given to those private banking families, commonly known as the FED, tax free. Like many of you, I had some difficulty with the concept of creating money from nothing. You may have heard the term "monetizing the debt," which is kind of the same thing. As an example, if the US Government wants to borrow $1 million ó the government does borrow every dollar it spends ó they go to the FED to borrow the money. The FED calls the Treasury and says print 10,000 Federal Reserve Notes (FRN) in units of one hundred dollars. The Treasury charges the FED 2.3 cents for each note, for a total of $230 for the 10,000 FRNs. The FED then lends the $1 million to the government at face value plus interest. To add insult to injury, the government has to create a bond for $1 million as security for the loan. And the rich get richer. The above was just an example, because in reality the FED does not even print the money; it's just a computer entry in their accounting system. To put this on a more personal level, let's use another example. Today's banks are members of the Federal Reserve Banking System. This membership makes it legal for them to create money from nothing and lend it to you. Today's banks, like the goldsmiths of old, realize that only a small fraction of the money deposited in their banks is ever actually withdrawn in the form of cash. Only about 4 percent of all the money that exists is in the form of currency. The rest of it is simply a computer entry. Let's say you're approved to borrow $10,000 to do some home improvements. You know that the bank didn't actually take $10,000 from its pile of cash and put it into your pile? They simply went to their computer and input an entry of $10,000 into your account. They created, from thin air, a debt which you have to secure with an asset and repay with interest. The bank is allowed to create and lend as much debt as they want as long as they do not exceed the 10:1 ratio imposed by the FED. It sort of puts a new slant on how you view your friendly bank, doesn't it? How about those loan committees that scrutinize you with a microscope before approving the loan they created from thin air. What a hoot! They make it complex for a reason. They don't want you to understand what they are doing. People fear what they do not understand. You are easier to delude and control when you are ignorant and afraid. Now to put the frosting on this cake. When was the income tax created? If you guessed 1913, the same year that the FED was created, you get a gold star. Coincidence? What are the odds? If you are going to use the FED to create debt, who is going to repay that debt? The income tax was created to complete the illusion that real money had been lent and therefore real money had to be repaid. And you thought Houdini was good. So, what can be done? My father taught me that you should always stand up for what is right, even if you have to stand up alone. If "We the People" don't take some action now, there may come a time when "We the People" are no more. You should write a letter or send an email to each of your elected representatives. Many of our elected representatives do not understand the FED. Once informed they will not be able to plead ignorance and remain silent. Article 1, Section 8 of the US Constitution specifically says that Congress is the only body that can "coin money and regulate the value thereof." The US Constitution has never been amended to allow anyone other than Congress to coin and regulate currency. Ask your representative, in light of that information, how it is possible for the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, and the Federal Reserve Bank that it created, to be constitutional. Ask them why this private banking cartel is allowed to reap trillions of dollars in profits without paying taxes. Insist on an answer. Thomas Jefferson said, "If the America people ever allow private banks to control the issuance of their currencies, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all their prosperity until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered." Jefferson saw it coming 150 years ago. The question is, "Can you now see what is in store for us if we allow the FED to continue controlling our country?" "The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he breaks, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime, and the punishment of his guilt."John P. Curran Source: www.roc-grp.org/jfk.htmlCOMING NEXT: Major Frauds of the U.S. Monetary System
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michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
Posts: 2,100
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Post by michelle on May 12, 2006 19:42:07 GMT 4
THANKS FOR NOTHING, CONGRESS! GOP Reaches Deal On Tax Cuts $70 Billion Measure Would Extend Breaks Middle-Income Households Would Receive An Average Tax Cut Of $20 From The Agreement, While Households With Incomes Over $1 Million Would Receive Average Tax Cuts Of $42,000GOP Reaches Deal on Tax Cuts $70 Billion Measure Would Extend BreaksBy Jonathan Weisman and Paul Blustein Washington Post Staff Writers Wednesday, May 10, 2006 House and Senate Republican negotiators reached a final agreement yesterday on a five-year, nearly $70 billion tax package that would extend President Bush's deep cuts to tax rates on dividends and capital gains, while sparing about 15 million middle-income Americans from the alternative minimum tax. Republican leaders hope to pass the agreement swiftly. House consideration is scheduled for tonight, with the Senate likely to send the measure to the White House for the president's signature by the end of the week. But the package remains controversial, with GOP leaders saying it is essential to sustain a strong economic recovery and Democrats and a few Republicans saying the cuts would mainly benefit the wealthy and add to the long-term deficit. "Keeping taxes low helps Americans find and keep work, supports families and communities with good job bases, and makes America a great place to do business for companies both here at home and those overseas looking for a place to invest," Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) said in a statement. But with the budget deficit still expected to exceed $300 billion this year, despite a strong economy, opponents say the government cannot afford to add $70 billion more over the next five years. "The point is the preponderance of these revenues will go to upper-income people, people who make a million dollars or more," Sen. Olympia J. Snowe (R-Maine) said yesterday. "It's a question of priorities."Republican leaders say the tax cuts, especially the investor breaks passed in 2003, are responsible for strong economic growth that has bolstered federal tax receipts over the past year and whittled down deficit forecasts by as much as $70 billion. Even though the dividend and capital gains tax cuts are not set to expire until 2008, Republicans say extending them now through 2010 is vital to preserve economic stability and maintain a robust investment climate that has pushed the Dow Jones industrial average to near-record heights. [NOTE FROM MICHELLE: Why do this now? They set up tax cuts now for the wealthy and corporations before the Democrats are ALLOWED to win back control of Congress and possibly the Executive branch. This will NEVER be repealed; PAY ATTENTION TO LEGISLATION BEING PASSED, FOLKS, THEY'RE HOPING YOU WON'T]Critics maintain that those tax cuts have overwhelmingly benefited the wealthy, while budget cuts target programs for the poor to close a deficit created largely by tax cuts totaling nearly $2 trillion since Bush took office. Middle-income households would receive an average tax cut of $20 from the agreement, according to the joint Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center, while 0.02 percent of households with incomes over $1 million would receive average tax cuts of $42,000.The tax agreement would cut revenue to the Treasury by $90 billion over the next five years, but other measures would raise about $21 billion -- for a net loss to the Treasury of about $69 billion. By keeping the total five-year cost below $70 billion, negotiators satisfied arcane Senate budget rules, thus protecting the package from a filibuster and ensuring passage with a simple majority.Some of those revenue raisers will be controversial. One measure would allow upper-income savers with a traditional individual retirement account to pay taxes on the account's investment gains and then roll over some of the balance into a Roth IRA, where the money can be withdrawn tax-free upon retirement. The provision would raise about $6.4 billion over 10 years, seemingly keeping the size of the tax-cutting package down. But over the next 35 years, it would cost the government $36 billion, according to the Urban Institute. "And it's losing the money when we're really going to need it," said Leonard Burman, an economist at the Urban Institute. Another provision would roll back tax breaks offered to the five biggest petroleum companies for oil and gas exploration. Two other Senate-passed provisions that would have hit Big Oil much harder were dropped.But the main battleground remains the investor tax cuts, which reduced tax rates on most dividends to 15 percent from as high as 38.6 percent and on most capital gains to 15 percent from 20 percent. Republicans say those tax cuts were crucial to spurring economic growth over the past three years, by persuading more corporations to offer larger dividends and by sparking new business investment. A new report by the Republican staff of Congress's Joint Economic Committee notes that from mid-2000 to early 2003, nonresidential business investment plunged at a rate of 5.6 percent a year. From mid-2003, when the investment tax cuts were steaming toward passage, to early 2006, such investments grew by 9.2 percent a year. The stock market's recovery followed a similar timeline, as has employment growth. And federal tax revenue since the 2003 tax cut has rebounded from $1.9 trillion in 2004 to an anticipated $2.3 trillion this year. "It was as if a light switch has been thrown on," Treasury Secretary John W. Snow said yesterday. "Rarely has a piece of public policy been so effective, with the effects so evident and immediate." Some economists say the timing of those gains was coincidental. "You might credit the cuts with providing a little bit of a jump-start. But I think the main reason the economy has done so well the last couple of years has nothing to do with tax policy, and more to do with the corporate sector starting to spend some of their record profits," said Ethan Harris, chief U.S. economist of the Lehman Brothers investment bank. "We had very good markets in the '90s, before all these tax cuts went into effect," said former Treasury secretary Robert E. Rubin. The federal budget deficit, although smaller than the record $413 billion of 2004, will still be more than $300 billion this year, about where it was last year. And measured against the size of the economy, tax revenue remains well below where it stood before Bush began cutting taxes. In 2000, federal tax receipts equaled 20.9 percent of the gross domestic product. They fell to 16.3 percent of the GDP in 2004 before recovering to a projected 17.7 percent this year. Source: tinyurl.com/qbj9pPropaganda from the wealthy who benefit. I'm not a shareholder in anything; are you a shareholder, DT1? Also notice they tell us how good the economy is, how many jobs have been created. Never mind that those jobs for us peons are at retail stores paying minimum wage, part time, with no employee benefits ......MichelleShareholders Applaud Senate Action to Extend Lower Rate on Capital Gains and Dividend Income5/11/2006 8:03:00 PM Contact: Daniel Clifton of the American Shareholders Association, 202-549-7803 WASHINGTON, May 11 /U.S. Newswire/ -- What a difference three years makes. In May 2003, the Senate and House were finalizing the Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act which reduced income tax rates, cut the capital gains tax, slashed the double tax on dividends, and expanded business expensing. At that time, the doomsday Senators claimed the U.S. economy was the worst economy since the Great Depression. Yet, since the legislation passed, 5.3 million jobs have been created, the economy is expanding at a 3.9 percent rate, business investment is soaring, $13 trillion of household wealth has shored up household balance sheets, and dividend payments to shareholders are up 40 percent. ??!!!!!Today's action in the United States Senate, which ends a 16- month legislative campaign to extend the lower 15 percent tax rate on capital gains and dividends, will enhance the nation's economic success by ensuring American taxpayers are not hit with unnecessary tax increases. With Senate passage, the conference report now moves to President Bush's desk for his signature. The President has made extension of these lower rates a top priority and will sign the legislation. "After three years the evidence is in and overwhelmingly concludes the tax cut on capital gains and dividends have been an awe-inspiring success," said Daniel Clifton, executive director of the Washington based American Shareholders Association (ASA). "Not only will shareholders keep more of their own investment income, the tax cuts also boosted markets, increased dividend payments to shareholders and paved the way for strong economic growth. I applaud the Senate's action today to extend these provisions, which have been so beneficial to the U.S. economy and American shareholders." According to Standard and Poors, between 2003 and 2005, S&P 500 shareholders received an additional cumulative $98.7 billion of cash than before the tax cut from the tax cut savings combined with dividend increases. Since a large portion of the dividends are being reinvested, the additional savings is significantly boosting total returns for shareholders. At the same time, the reduction in capital gains taxes has boosted the after tax return on equities. The net result of this change is increasing stock values which is evidenced by the more than $5 trillion of new shareholder wealth has been created since the tax cut was signed into law. As a result, tax revenues from capital gains and dividends are soaring. In fact, capital gains tax revenues have actually increased $47 billion over the last three years while initially expected to lose $3 billion over the three years. Record dividend payments have also surged tax revenues and overall the combined capital gains and dividend tax cuts have more than paid for themselves. "The extension provides investors the certainty lower rates will be in place in future years to make investments today," continued Clifton. "However, American Shareholders Association will continue to work tirelessly on behalf of our members to make these provisions permanent." The American Shareholders Association is a non-partisan, not- for-profit organization dedicated to analyzing public policy affecting shareholders. For more information please contact Daniel Clifton at 202-549-7803 or by email at dclifton@americanshareholders.com
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michelle
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Post by michelle on May 15, 2006 15:13:04 GMT 4
History Of Rothschilds (Video)tinyurl.com/o3pasMajor Frauds of the U.S. Monetary SystemJason Hommel Fraud #1. Paper Money. Originally, a paper dollar was a paper promise, a contract, to pay in gold or silver. The issuers of dollars have defaulted on that promise numerous times in recent history, at a rate of about once per generation. The issuers of paper money defaulted on domestic gold redemption in 1934, defaulted on silver redemption in 1968, and defaulted on international gold redemption in 1971. Those who issue U.S. paper money (Federal Reserve Notes) are in default. The creation of paper money is fraud, and was used to steal away gold and silver from the hands of the people. Fraud #1 (A). Unchecked Borrowing and Printing of more Paper Money. All paper money is borrowed into existence, and that does not make the excessive creation of paper money right. This fraud is an additional theft upon all people who are already deceived by holding onto the fraudulent dollars, instead of gold and silver. The total amount of money in the U.S. banking system is known as M3, and is almost $9 Trillion as of Jan., 2004. www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h6/Current/Fraud #2. The Debt of the U.S. Federal Government. Originally, this debt was incurred to a large degree to fight and win World War II, as the debt soared from under $50 billion to over $250 billion by the war's end. This was fraud, however, because at the time, the U.S. was on a gold standard at $35/oz., and the U.S. never borrowed $250 billion worth of gold in the first place, we only borrowed paper money that was created to excess. The debt is primarily used as a means to hide the fact of the excessive creation of paper money. By the end of Feb, 2004, the debt can be rounded up to $7.1 Trillion, and is as fraudulent today as it ever was. See www.publicdebt.treas.gov/opd/opdpenny.htmFraud #3. Fractional Reserve Banking. Banks don't even have the fraudulent paper money they say you have in your account. They say you have "on demand" deposits, but they loan deposits out long term, which is fraud, because you cannot demand your deposits when you want. You have to order cash in advance, which your bank will have to order from the Fed, if you take out more than a few thousand dollars, and sometimes they will not even provide such a "service" of giving you your money, but will only give you a cashier's check. What are the fractional reserve requirements? In June of 2001, it was $37 billion for the entire U.S. banking system. See www.frbsf.org/education/activities/drecon/2001/0108.htmlIn June of 2001, M3 was $7605 billion. See www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h6/hist/h6hist1.txtTherefore, in total, the reserve requirement was 37/7605, or .49%, or less than half of 1%. The reason why it is so low is that for the first $6 million of deposits at a depository (your local branch) the reserve requirement is zero. Then, for the next $6 million to $45 million, the amount is 3%. Then, for amounts larger than $45 million, it is 10%. See www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/reservereq.htmTherefore, since the vast majority of deposits are small ones, the effective reserve requirement is close to zero, or that 1/2 of 1%. Fractional reserve banking is fraud, because those reserves cannot simultaneously be used to pay out to depositors and be used to back up the rest of the deposits at the same time. If more than 1/2 of 1% of people took their money out of the banking system, the system would collapse, unless the banks were willing to go to the Federal Reserve (the lender of last resort) and borrow more paper money. The system works fine in theory, but works only for paper money. (And in practice, it has only worked for less than 20 years.) But there is no "lender of last resort" for real gold and silver. Fraud #3 (A). The FDIC, or Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. www.fdic.gov/ The FDIC, in theory, insures accounts up to $100,000. As inflation continues, the value of this number grows smaller every year. In theory, this insurance is in place in case the bank is insolvent and fails due to a bank run, and insufficient fractional reserve requirements. In practice, it is there to back up banks that fail that the Federal Reserve refuses to bail out. In practice, sometimes depositors have to wait months to be paid this insurance money. In practice, the FDIC does not have the money to back up the accounts, either, which is fraud. You would need this insurance the most if there was runaway inflation. If there was runaway inflation and a million dollars became nearly worthless, then the effective insurance amount of the FDIC would be close to zero. In my view, insurance itself is collectivism, and fraud. Why should one depositor in New England who makes a deposit in a small town bank have to pay for the lack of fiscal responsibility of an entirely different bank, in an entirely different company, in an entirely different state such as New Mexico, and ultimately pay to protect those depositors in New Mexico? This transference of responsibility, through the FDIC, is fraud and a crime. Fraud #4. Central bank gold-leasing. This is the fraud that GATA has been working to expose. The central banks own gold in two forms, real gold in their vaults, and paper promises. They report it all as if it were one category, which is fraud. The official estimates are that 30,000+ tonnes of "gold" are held by the central banks, and of that, 5000 tonnes have been leased out. The GATA research, by three different methods by three different people, shows that the amount leased out is closer to 15,000 tonnes. To say they have gold, when they do not have gold because it has been leased out, is fraud. To lease out the people's gold (that ostensibly backs up the people's currency) without the people's knowledge or consent, is fraud. U.S. gold is stated to be 261.5 million ounces. See www.fms.treas.gov/gold/index.html (x 32152 oz/tonne, it's also 8407 tonnes.) The U.S. gold has not been audited by any independent third party since the 1960's. Even if the U.S. government really still has all this gold, and even if they pledged it against all deposits in the U.S. via the FDIC and backed the full $9 Trillion of money in the banks, M3, (and it is purely a fantasy that they would be so honorable) there would be only one ounce of gold for every $34,482. (That's 9,000,000 million (a trillion is a million million) dollars / 261 million oz.) Fraud #5. Bonds. Bonds are a paper promise to pay more fraudulent paper promises. It is fraud upon fraud. In theory, a bondholder will always receive more paper money than they lent out when they bought the bond in the first place. In practice, that does not matter if inflation rises faster than the rate of return, in which case the bondholder loses value. What does it matter to be paid more money, if the money is worth much less? Or, if bond interest rates rise as inflation increases happen, then the current re-sale value of the bond drops tremendously. Fraud #5. (A). Inflation indexed bonds. These bonds promise to pay out a variable rate of return, indexed, or matched to the inflation rate. This is fraud upon fraud because they lie about the inflation rate, saying it is lower than it really is. Currently, the government is claiming that the inflation rate is about 1%. In reality, by mid 2003, the inflation rate was closer to 6%. Since mid 2003, many commodities are up about 20% or more, and by the end of 2003, we may be experiencing an annualized inflation rate of 40% in the U.S.! Furthermore, the dollar continues to drop against other currencies, and is down to 85 from a high of about 130, which is a drop of about 35%! Furthermore, what use is it to be paid out in more and more paper money, if the ultimate value of paper money will return to its intrinsic value, which is zero? Also, inflation indexed bonds will help to cause the very inflation that is feared. As more and more money will be needed to pay off the bonds, inflation will be forced to increase more and more! Therefore, if you own inflation-indexed bonds that are paying you anything less than about 50% per year, then I suppose you have been deceived by this fraud, too. $33 Trillion, U.S.: The value of the World bond market yr end, '01: tinyurl.com/vr7u$20.2 Trillion, U.S.: The value of the U.S. bond market, yr end, '02: tinyurl.com/vr7gBonds are used to steal away gold and silver still in the hands of the people who would not be deceived through paper money alone, and who are tempted through the lure of the crime of usury, or receiving an interest rate. If all the U.S. bonds, and M3, were both backed by the U.S. gold hoard, it would mean that there are about $29,000,000 million (a trillion is a million million) / 261 million = $111,111/ per oz. of gold. Fraud #6. Paper futures contracts, and derivatives, especially when created to excess. The dollar is a derivative, and a paper contract, but that's not the only one. There are also contracts at the COMEX, and on the "over the counter" (OTC) market to deliver gold and silver. At the COMEX, in silver, we regularly see over 100,000 contracts for 5000 ounces, or 500 million ounces. To see how many contracts there are for 5000 ounces, see www.nymex.com/jsp/markets/sil_fut_csf.jsp?But they have only 52 million ounces of silver in the registered category, ready for delivery. To see how much silver they have now, see www.nymex.com/jsp/markets/sil_fut_wareho.jspThe value of 52 million oz. of silver, at $6.50/oz. = $338 million. The frauds here are similar to the fraud of the dollar and the fraud of fractional reserve banking, all in one. They have made too many futures contracts to deliver gold and silver, just as they have printed up too many dollars. And they only have a small portion of real gold and silver to back up their promises to deliver. If bondholders ($20 trillion) and bank account holders ($9 trillion) ever think to prefer the safety of owning physical silver again, they should know that buying silver is a "first come first served" process. They should know that there is $29,000,000 million (a trillion is a million million) dollars available for the 52 million oz. of silver available in the market, or $557,692/oz. Fraud #6 (A). Options. As if paper futures contracts were not enough to deceive people through the "magic" and "promise" of leverage, they have options on paper futures contracts, where a person puts down even less money to "control" the silver and "profit" from its price rise. (It's as if the lure of 100,000 fold gains are simply enough for these greedy and deceived people.) Fraud #7. Position limits on longs. At the COMEX, there are limits upon how much one person or entity can buy. I believe it is a false idea that longs can manipulate the market. It is impossible for longs to manipulate a free market! In a free market, everyone is free to buy and own whatever they wish, and own however much silver they wish. Restrictions on longs or restrictions on ownership is nothing less than communism, theft, and fraud! What good is money if you cannot spend it on whatever you wish? If you cannot buy what you wish, your money is no good! In other words, the entire U.S. monetary system is no good, it's fraudulent from top to bottom. As a recent example, position limits were reduced for buyers of copper futures in the spot month, from 5000 contracts to 3000 contracts on December 22, 2003. See www.nymex.com/jsp/news/press_releas.jsp?id=pr20031222bFraud #8. Delivery delays for COMEX silver (also known as defaults). A default occurs when there was fraud. It is also known as bankruptcy, or a failure to deliver upon an obligation or promise. If a bank cannot honor on-demand deposits, then the bank is insolvent, or bankrupt. Similarly, if someone promises to deliver silver by a certain date, and is unable to do so, they are bankrupt, and in default, and have committed fraud. Since there have already been delivery delays of silver, then the long awaited default at the COMEX has already occurred. This is probably the best explanation for why the price of silver is moving up at this time. The last major silver defaults were the failure to pay out silver when silver certificates (dollars) were presented for delivery, way back in 1968. Frauds numbered 6-8 are the frauds that Ted Butler has been working to expose. Fraud #9. Banking hold times. Why are there such long hold times on checks when you make a deposit in your bank, and hold times on wire transfers? They say it is for my protection, but I think it's for the bank's protection, or profit! A wire transfer can take up to a week. Depositing a check can take from a week to 3-4 weeks before they let you withdraw your money! Outrageous! As bulky and as heavy as silver bullion is, it is quicker and easier to ship silver bullion than to deal with the so-called "convenience" of U.S. paper dollars in the banking system. Fraud #10. Legal tender laws. To add insult to injury, legal tender laws are laws that treat these frauds as if they were the corner stone of "The American Way". They force people to accept the fraud, in place of real money, gold and silver. And they prevent people from making and contracting for gold and silver, even though the big banks are somehow exempt, and can contract in gold and silver all they want through the "over the counter" derivatives market. The fraud of legal tender laws is the fraud that www.fame.org/#Strategy has been working to expose. Fraud #11. Tax on gold and silver purchases. In the U.S., some states collect a sales tax on the purchase of gold and silver coin. It usually ranges from about 5-8%. In some states, such as California, it is only applicable on transactions for less than $1000. In Europe, they have what is called a VAT, or "value added tax". It's also fraud. There can be no tax on a money exchange. When you get two $5 bills for a $10 bill, do you pay tax? Of course not. When you convert money from the Canadian dollar to the U.S. dollar is there a tax? Of course not. Therefore, there should be no tax on other money exchanges. The fraud of the tax on bullion is a fraud that Franklin Sanders has been working to expose. Fraud #12, The Income Tax. Prior to 1913 when the Federal Reserve was founded, there never was an income tax, and America got along just fine without it for hundreds of years. Between 1913 and 1945, the income tax was paid only by the extremely wealthy, and it started out as only a tiny percentage of income. The income tax did not become widespread and was not paid by the average person until after World War II, and it was supposed to be "temporary". We've been paying this temporary tax ever since, and with no end in sight. The income tax is fraudulent because it is and unconstitutional on many grounds, but the judges of the nation rule as if they do not care. Fraud #13, The Social Security Number (SSN). Started by FDR in the depression, the original cards are printed with the phrase, "not to be used for identification purposes." Now, due to the Patriot Act, you cannot get a bank account without one. The social security system is a fraudulent ponzi scheme. It is collectivism. Fortunately, I don't use a SSN, which is a protection from most of the frauds of the entire system. Conclusions: Fraud is not the American Way. Unfortunately, it is the way of life today -- that we all must face. Anyone who uses paper money is guilty of allowing these frauds to continue. Anyone who saves in terms of paper money in the banks is guilty of allowing themselves to be deceived by these multiple frauds. It is wrong to participate in, or by deceived by fraud, just because many other people also participate. Stop participating in fraud, and stop allowing yourself to be deceived by fraud. Which of the above frauds do you think is the greatest fraud of the monetary system in the U.S. today? One of the above, or one I may have left out? I'd like to read what you think. Email jasonhommel@yahoo.com I may not have time to respond to each letter, but I really do appreciate and read all the feedback. I believe that the best way to protect yourself from the frauds and excesses of the U.S. monetary system is to own real silver bullion. I also invest in silver stocks, which I think have the potential to continue to provide a greater return on investment than silver bullion. For example, silver is up about 50%, and silver stocks are up about 350% since June of 2003. If you would like to receive my free weekly silver stock report in email, sign up for the free e-book at www.goldismoney.comThe beauty of the internet is that it is helping knowledge to increase, and it is a form of communication that those who commit these crimes of monetary fraud upon us cannot control. Please make the most of it, and please forward this on to others.February 24, 2004 SOURCE: tinyurl.com/8xbo5
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michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
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Post by michelle on May 18, 2006 17:10:47 GMT 4
Supreme Court Officially Emasculates Taxpayersby David Sirota 5.15.06 SNIP:Supreme Court officially emasculates taxpayers In a unanimous decision today, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a lower court ruling that would have invalidated massive taxpayer giveaways to Corporate America. The Supreme Court has long been the victim of a hostile takeover by Big Money interests. It is a court now headed by a corporate lawyer that has repeatedly gone out of its way to protect Corporate America's ability to bleed the middle class dry. Today's ruling, though, is particularly egregious. Not only did the court strike down an important ruling, but it essentially emasculated taxpayers' ability Read the rest: tinyurl.com/z9s5aRelated Story:Big Corporate Tax Breaks Upheld Taxpayers Had No Right To Fight State Incentives In U.S. Court, Justices Say. But The Case Isn't Deadby David G. Savage tinyurl.com/k8tloBush’s gift to the super-rich The tax-cut crooks strike againMay 19, 2006 ELIZABETH SCHULTE reports on George Bush’s latest scam to line the pockets of the super-rich with tax cuts.GEORGE W. BUSH’S approval rating may be plummeting in opinion polls, but his latest $70 billion tax break package is keeping him popular with the people who matter most to him--the super-rich. Bush is set to sign into law a bill that extends tax cuts on stock dividends and capital gains--special federal taxes on assets and other income--until the year 2010. The legislation, which passed both houses of Congress, originally aimed at making the Bush administration’s 2001 and 2003 tax cuts permanent, but Republicans settled for a further two-year extension. In another case of politician doublespeak, the legislation’s sponsors called it the “Tax Increase Prevention Act.”“Let me make it perfectly clear: This legislation is good news for working Americans and for the economy of this country,” crowed Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.). But in reality, what’s “perfectly clear” is that working people won’t benefit from these tax breaks. Some 87 percent of the benefits of these tax breaks will go to households with incomes above $100,000, according to the Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center. Fifty-five percent of the benefits will go to the tiny 3 percent of households that take in more than $200,000 a year. And if you make more than $1 million a year, which adds up to just 0.2 percent of all households, you’ll get nearly one-quarter of the benefits. In total, 68 percent of households will receive no benefits at all. “These tax cuts are very skewed to the wealthy,” said Len Burman, director of the Tax Policy Center. “There’s hardly anything in the package that favors anyone earning under $100,000.” If your family falls in the 20 percent of households in the middle of the income spectrum, your average tax cut would be $20. If your family rakes in $1 million or more a year, your average tax cut is $43,000. Another hidden break for the rich included in the legislation is a provision that allows high-income individuals to convert regular IRAs to Roth IRAs, where all the gains are tax-free. Currently, only households making under $100,000 are allowed to convert to the Roth IRA. According to the Tax Policy Center, three-quarters of the benefits of the Roth IRA proposal would go to households with incomes above $200,000. Almost 35 percent of the benefits would go to those with incomes of over $1 million. Another part of the legislation is an increase in the income level at which households are exempt from the alternative minimum tax (AMT), a tax that was established in 1969 supposedly to ensure that the wealthy pay their share. And while Congress pushed through these tax breaks in the name of “stimulating the economy,” a savings credit for low-income people expired last year with hardly a peep. Lawmakers also failed to extend a deduction for college tuition payments, which benefited middle-income workers.The Bush administration’s tax-break bonanza for the rich is the latest, worst example of a tax system that’s stacked against the majority. Over the last three decades, Washington has increasingly shifted the burden of taxes off Corporate America and onto workers and the poor.This practice isn’t confined to Republican administrations, but happened under the pro-business presidency of Bill Clinton as well. As New York Times reporter David Cay Johnston concludes in his book The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich--and Cheat Everybody Else, “What surprised me more than anything was the realization that our tax system now levies the poor, the middle class and even the upper middle class to subsidize the rich...[T]he majority of Americans are being duped into supplementing the incomes and extravagant lifestyles of the rich and powerful.”Source: www.socialistworker.org/2006-1/589/589_16_TaxCut.shtml
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michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
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Post by michelle on May 22, 2006 19:24:19 GMT 4
AMERICA! It is imperative that you understand what has been done to us and our country. WE ARE NOT A FREE NATION!!!! Read the following so that you begin to KNOW how we have been sabotaged, ENSLAVED, and destroyed as a people and a country.....MichelleHistory of Money and Private Central Bank Ownership by Freemason/Zionists Mafiaauthor: Alexander James Henry Ford (founder of the Ford Motor Company in 1903) stated: "It is well that the people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning." (see The Foundation Economy by Fred Eggerton).
In this expose, we are presenting numerous quotes from past US Presidents and polictians and demonstrate how control and profits of the private Central Banks has been the catalyst behind many wars. Note that all four presidents who tried to end the banking monopolies were assassinated (Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, Kennedy) and anyone who tries to expose these Banking Dynasties is demonized like Rep. Congressman James Traficant in 1993 and many others. READ ON:portland.indymedia.org/en/2003/06/266805.shtml
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michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
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Post by michelle on May 28, 2006 19:54:17 GMT 4
The dollar's evil twin: Exploring the Bush bureaucracy's private monetary system By Jane Stillwater Online Journal Guest Writer May 23, 2006, 01:15
I was happily hiking through Tilden Park on Mothers' Day when all the stuff I have been reading on the Internet regarding the sorry state of the American economy suddenly coalesced inside of my head. "Aha!" I said to the tree next to me as suddenly everything started to make sense.
Here's what I had learned from the Internet:
From Mike Whitney I learned that "Currently, the world is drowning in dollars, even a small movement could trigger a massive recession in the United States." I also learned that "There's no prospect of the US running a trade surplus anytime soon. Bush has savaged the manufacturing sector, outsourcing over 3 million jobs and shutting down plants across the country. . . . Currently, the national debt is a whopping $8.4 trillion with an equally harrowing $800 billion trade deficit."
Whitney also taught me that "the profligate spending, budget-busting tax cuts, and the shocking increase in the money supply (the Fed has doubled the money supply in one decade) has the greenback headed for the dumpster. Already, China and Japan (who hold an accumulated $1.7 trillion in US securities and currency) are gradually moving away from the dollar towards the euro."
From my friend Joe Thompson, I learned that "3.9 trillion dollars a day in wire transfers are going through the Federal Reserve of New York. No greenbacks, just digits." The Federal Reserve is apparently printing greenbacks like alchemists who have finally learned how to make gold out of air.
Joe also said that, "There's no way the stock market could continue to advance while buying inflated oil futures at the same time. Even with margin trading there is just so much money to go around. So the money had to come from really deep pockets -- which the oil companies have. They couldn't lose because they were feeding themselves with their own money."
Then of course Michael Rupert has taught us the critical lesson that drug money pouring in from Afghanistan and Colombia is what really keeps our economy afloat.
And I also got an interesting lesson from the Washington Post. "A $2.7 trillion budget plan pending before the House would raise the federal debt ceiling to nearly $10 trillion, less than two months after Congress last raised the federal government's borrowing limit." What lesson is this? That America's federal credit cards appear to be totally maxed out?
And economists are predicting another economic crash like the one in 1929. "The crisis won't come immediately," stated Paul Krugman back in 2003. "For a few years, America will still be able to borrow freely, simply because lenders assume that things will somehow work out. But at a certain point we'll have a Wile E. Coyote moment. . . . Mr. Coyote had a habit of running off cliffs and taking several steps on thin air before noticing that there was nothing underneath his feet. Only then would he plunge."
I put all these facts into my brain, stirred them up and added a few more facts that I stole off of Google. "America's total national income is approximately $2,100 billion a year but our debt is approximately $8 TRILLION." That means that we taxpayers are only making enough salary to pay off less than one percent of our debt. And yet our economy hasn't crashed?
What does THAT mean?
What IS keeping our economy together?
Is there some secret underground world of money that we average Americans know nothing about? Is there some private monetary system that really runs the economy -- and has nothing to do with the "dollar?"
Or does the U.S. dollar have an evil twin?
Still deep in thought, I walked over to the park's Little Farm and looked at the chickens, pigs, rabbits and cows. "No one is gonna believe this," I told a chicken that had just pecked at my shoe. "They are all gonna just think that I'm paranoid. But seriously, look at the evidence. . . ." The chicken looked.
"The American economy is in deep trouble but it hasn't crashed. That's against every law of economics since Adam Smith!The feds SHOULD be bankrupt. Yet they are not." The chicken nodded its head.
"There must be money pouring into the system from somewhere." The chicken agreed.
"But where?" No-bid contract money-pits, drug money, petro-dollars, money-laundering schemes, off-shore hidey-holes, safety-deposit boxes full of gold, numbered Swiss bank accounts, artificial money creation, the outrageous use of credit, Enron-style boondoggles. . . . If you add in all these shadow sources of revenue, NOW the booming U.S. economy makes sense." Holy sheep dookie. "That means that corruption and nepotism and cronyism and bribes and embezzlement and money-laundering and drugs are holding our economy together!" The chicken nodded again.
"Since we stopped taxing the rich and 'offshore' corporations, the money hemorrhaging out of OUR wallets is only a drop in the bucket in staunching the flood of national debt. If the national economy was only financed by us measly taxpayers, this above-ground economy would be a train wreck waiting to happen. Yet the underground economy of billionaires just keeps chugging happily along." The chicken agreed.
But wait. It gets worse. "If the dollar crashes tomorrow, none of the Bush bureaucrats will be affected. WE depend on the dollar. We would go belly-up. THEY depend on a shadow economy and the dollar's evil twin who they keep locked up somewhere in the Cayman Islands -- or in the new mega-embassy in Baghdad. They will be fine." The chicken squawked.
"But how did we Americans allow this to happen? How did we degenerate into a bunch of poor little match girls, standing in the snow and staring longingly through the window as the dollar's evil clones live high on the hog?" The chicken had no idea.
Then I thought of one of Whitney's other comments. "By collapsing the dollar, Bush can shift the wealth of the American middle class to corporate mandarins in the blink of an eye. Industry profits will soar while working class people drown in an ocean of red ink."
Then the chicken pooped on my foot.
See Jane Stillwater's Web Log for more of her outside-the-box essays and observations.
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michelle
Administrator
I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
Posts: 2,100
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Post by michelle on May 29, 2006 19:10:40 GMT 4
NAFTA, CAFTA and the FTAAWhat will the Bilderbergers be discussing in Canada this summer? I say they'll be laying out plans for the same folks who forced CAFTA down our throats as “free trade”; they will do the same thing with the FTAA but it will be many times more dangerous for some sovereign nations in South America, small businesses, and the common citizen in the Americas...... MichelleBilderberg to Meet in CanadaBy James P. Tucker Jr. The secretive group known as Bilderberg will hold its annual secret meeting at the posh Brook Street Resort a few miles from Ottawa, Canada, June 8-11. The location and part of the agenda was disclosed to American Free Press by a source inside Bilderberg’s inner circle. High on the Bilderberg’s secret agenda this year are oil prices and the political upheaval in Latin America. When meeting last year in Rottach-Egern, Germany, Bilderberg called for dramatic increases in the price of oil. Oil prices started climbing immediately from $40 a barrel to $70. Whether Bilderberg will call for still higher prices is unclear, but Henry Kissinger and others had gleefully anticipated ultimate prices at $150 a barrel a year ago. Bilderberg is certainly concerned about supply, which is related to the “Latin American problem,” as one insider said. Approximately 120 international leaders in politics and finance will also discuss the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which has caused a rare breach between American Bilderbergers and their European counterparts since the United States Iraq invasion in 2003. Whether the United States should invade Iran is also high on the agenda. Bilderberg is especially concerned about Venezuela, where as part of a plan to increase revenues from its petroleum industry President Hugo Chavez said May 7 he would impose a new tax on companies that extract oil from his country. Big Oil is represented at Bilderberg by Jeroen van der Veer of The Netherlands, chairman of the Royal Dutch/Shell Group and Franco Bernabe of Italy, vice chairman of Rothschild Europe, among others. “We are going to create a new oil tax, called the tax on extraction,” Chavez said. “The companies that are pumping oil in Venezuela are making a lot of money.” Chavez accused foreign oil companies of exploiting his country’s vast petroleum reserves without paying sufficient taxes. Venezuela is the world’s fifth-largest oil exporter but has troubled oil barons by sending cheap petroleum to needy American families and subsidizing domestic use so local citizens pay 12 cents a gallon. Venezuela has voided oil-pumping contracts with private companies at 32 fields and replaced them with a mixed-company model that gave Venezuela’s state-owned Petroleos de Venezuela SA a minimum 60 percent stake. Chavez has also sharply raised royalties and taxes, and reduced potential drilling acreage by almost two-thirds. He is also resisting expansion of NAFTA throughout the hemisphere, a prime Bilderberg goal.Chavez’s outspoken criticisms of the United States make it unlikely that American Bilderbergers can help smooth over the supply problem. However, banker David Rockefeller’s family has always had a heavy interest in oil and other investments in South America.President Bush will have a top White House aide representing him at Bilderberg, and high officials of the state, defense and treasury departments will attend. Heads of state and other high officials in government and banking will attend from Europe and Canada. Bilderberg’s agenda also includes the turmoil in the Middle East, nuclear proliferation, with an emphasis on Iran, North Korea and Pakistan, and global warming. The Bilderberg group takes it name from the hotel in Holland where the group met in 1954, during the earliest period of its inception. Bilderbergers meet regularly, presumably on a once-a-year basis, at various locations around the world, always in extreme secrecy, often at resorts controlled by either the Rockefeller or Rothschild families. The Rothschild family is the leading European force within the Bilderberg Group, sharing its power with the American-based Rockefeller empire. Bilderberg maintains an extremely low profile and seldom, if ever, publishes reports or studies for the public, at least, under its own official aegis. Participants denied the groups very existence for decades until it was forced into the open by the glare of media publicity, generated largely by the now defunct Spotlight newspaper. (Issue #22, May 29, 2006) Source: tinyurl.com/rzrs2**************************************************** Related Story:Chavez Says US Working For Coup In Bolivia Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez On Sunday Accused The United States Of Trying To Stir Up A Military Rebellion Against His Left-Wing Bolivian Ally President Evo Moralesby Lorraine Orlandi news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=790592006**************************************************** NOTES ON FREE TRADE:Go to the website of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). There you will find a document entitled Building a North American Community. www.cfr.org/content/publications/attachments/NorthAmerica_TF_final.pdf Checking in at 47 pages excluding acknowledgements and other front matter, Building a North American Community provides a blueprint for the integration of the United States, Mexico and Canada under a single supranational authority. This plan would, for all practical purposes, dissolve the borders between each nation and end the lip-service to the Constitution within our own. It would bring NAFTA to fruition, building more of the “architecture of a new international system” about which Dr. Henry Kissinger spoke candidly back in 1993 when NAFTA was being accorded bipartisan support as a “free trade” agreement.
The defenders of NAFTA and CAFTA portray themselves as “free traders.” The FT in both of the above stands for Free Trade. There is a huge push for the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA www.ftaa-alca.org/alca_e.asp ] right around the corner, this is a multimillion-dollar question right now. We must realize that the meaning of the phrase has undergone a 180-degree switch that would have jolted even Orwell (“slavery is freedom,” “some are more equal than others,” etc.).
Wealth is acquired through plundering the productive actions of others. Open stealing, that is, acquired through legal plunder. Legal plunder occurs when “the law” is hijacked from its original intent and made to serve some special interest. The special interest may be a corporation (or group of corporations, or cartel). It may be a political party. Or it may be some government-designated protected group. These special interests forcibly take the fruits of the actions of some and distribute them to others. They seize wealth from those who produced it and give it to those who did not.
There is nothing fundamentally wrong with getting rich—provided one’s wealth came from legitimate trade, not through legal plunder, or borrowing against the future, or through the kinds of subterfuge that internationalist investment bankers have always used to enrich themselves by creating “wealth” out of thin air. Legal plunder appeals to those who are fascinated by power, and who have convinced themselves of their special qualifications to rule over others because of their superior “enlightenment.”What does the phrase free trade mean?I have identified a need and produced a good (or service) that others want and are willing to pay for. Suppose we agree on a reasonable price—“reasonable” here is a compromise between what I desire to earn and what people are willing to pay me for the good (or service). So I offer the good; my customers offer me money. We trade; each of us goes away satisfied. There was no coercion anywhere. I produced the good (or service) through my ingenuity, undertaking the actions necessary to bring it to my would-be customers’ attention. They saw it as something of value to them—something they believed would improve their lives. That is free trade. If enough people want the good (or service) I have to offer, then due to increased revenue I am soon in a position to produce more of it, and then still more after that. I can no longer do everything myself, but must assemble a team of people to do the work—a workforce. In this way I create jobs. I can get rich—legitimately, through production and not through plunder; those under me also increase their standard of living, possibly to the point of getting rich themselves if they stick around long enough and save rather than spend. Or they may decide to compete with me. The competition will keep me on my toes. This is called free enterprise. It will build prosperity—the real thing! Notice that government is not involved. It has not restricted my earnings; nor has it restricted the customer’s right to buy. Nor has it given any of us special favors—otherwise known as subsidies or tax breaks (in a genuine free enterprise system neither property nor personal income are taxed). That yield’s our first really important result here: if trade is really free, then government is not involved. It plays hands off! Nor are investment bankers involved in this system!
If investment bankers gain control of a country’s money supply, they can control the country—usually, again, through money lending. If investment bankers operate across national boundaries, they can control many countries. If the value of a country’s currency is destroyed, its economy is hijacked. It serves an increasingly powerful elite, not the entrepreneurs or their customers. This is what happened to America.
This minority has no scruples about using plunder to attain wealth or political goals. They prefer legal to illegal plunder for obvious reasons, and subterfuge to the obvious theft of a nation’s inheritance and culture. This minority might go into banking, loaning money to governments and attaching conditions. Thus it might become a hidden establishment behind the visible one—a shadow government behind the official one. Or this minority might go into government to reap the rewards of the freebies, writing new laws extending the powers of government even though these do more to increase the power of the hidden establishment. In other words, they ruthlessly exploit situations such as the one sketched above. Or some of its members might take up residence in successful corporations and discover that wealth once produced is easier to maintain if one can borrow money or buy favors (subsidies, tax breaks) from government that gives them unearned advantages over competitors. That is, they adopting subtle plunder over genuine production, and thus contribute to the destruction of genuine free enterprise. Those in huge multinational corporations often don’t mind regulations. Regulations mean power. They can afford the lawyers and layers of bureaucracy. Their smaller competitors cannot. The regulations will fail to solve whatever hoked-up problems they were written to address. But only the naïve can believe that the purpose of the regulatory state, or the micromanaged economy is to benefit smaller companies, or help the workers, or protect consumers, or protect the environment. The regulatory state benefits those who like power and know how to work behind the scenes to increase theirs.
How does a society whose members wish to remain free control this minority of vipers in its midst? Thomas Jefferson once said that vigilance is the price of liberty. Jefferson warned us against investment bankers: “If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their Fathers conquered… I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies...” That central banking was dangerous to both liberty and free enterprise couldn’t have been said more clearly. Vigilance in Jefferson’s sense includes closest possible attention to the language of freedom versus that of plunder and regulation. Words and phrases are not arbitrary. When used properly they refer to specific states of affairs in the world. Orwell’s great realization was that those who want power will manipulate language to conceal their true purposes.
They will speak not of building up an edifice of controls around entire populations but of the need to promote “global democracy,” or “sustainable development,” or the importance of allowing “no child left behind”—or “free trade.” With this, we come to our present reality. There were, and are, well-intentioned folks who saw NAFTA as good, because their brains were paralyzed by the phrase free trade in North American Free Trade Agreement. Same with CAFTA. What should have made those who approve of real free trade suspicious is the thousands of pages it took to have these supposed “free trade” agreements. Read those pages, and you’ll see thousands of regulations—some pertaining to the environment (sustainable development), some pertaining to women (the influence of radical feminism), some pertaining to “diversity,” some to “health,” and so on.
If the promotion of such agreements as NAFTA, CAFTA and the FTAA as “free trade” agreements involves abuse of the words free trade, then a charge of protectionism is meaningless at best, hypocritical at worst. A system built up on regulations which only the big corporations can afford to comply with, subsidies favoring some at the expense of others, etc., by its very nature protects the corporations at the expense of everyone else. The natural step is to advocate protections for one’s own, to avoid that nasty choice between outsourcing one’s workforce and being driven out of business. Protections for American textile jobs were, of course, one of the things offered to politicians in the House in exchange for votes for CAFTA. Protections always carry a price tag. What the powerful protect, they can cease protecting at will.
NAFTA and CAFTA are no more about genuine free trade than they are about any other form of liberty. They are about control: not just over trade but over resources and ultimately every other significant aspect of the individual’s life. CAFTA is a threat to U.S. independence. By voting for it members of the Senate and the House violated their oaths of office to uphold the U.S. Constitution as the Supreme Law of the Land—Article VI, Paragraph 2.) Text above clipped [with some minor changes in wording to fit the flow of information] from :www.newswithviews.com/Yates/steven10.htmPull up the online text of CAFTA and read it:CAFTA-DR Final Text:The Central America-Dominican Republic-United States Free Trade Agreement, which was signed on August 5, 2004, is designed to eliminate tariffs and trade barriers and expand regional opportunities for the workers, manufacturers, consumers, farmers, ranchers and service providers of all the countries. CAFTA-DR will immediately eliminate tariffs on more than 80 percent of U.S. exports of consumer and industrial products, phasing out the rest over 10 years. Eighty percent of CAFTA-DR imports already enter the United States duty free under the Caribbean Basin Initiative, Generalized System of Preferences and Most Favored Nation programs; the CAFTA-DR will provide reciprocal access for U.S. products and services. Read It: www.ustr.gov/Trade_Agreements/Bilateral/CAFTA/CAFTA-DR_Final_Texts/Section_Index.html
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